This Week @ Bass Edge

Shaky head delivers the goods

“Look at that,” said Table Rock Lake fishing guide Mike Webb. Line was peeling off his reel in  bursts.
Far below the surface, faint flashes began to reveal an angry combatant. I stood poised, net in hand, as Mike carefully allowed the bass to exhaust enough energy to coax it to the side of the boat.
Finally the surface shattered just below us, and I stabbed with the net. My miss prompted the fish to steal another 15 yards of line. A few minutes later, a second attempt was successful.
“It’s a meanmouth,” Mike announced.
Meanmouth is the label given to the product of the crossbreeding of a smallmouth and a spotted bass.
We had planned the trip for the previous day, but seated in his shop during the pre-dawn darkness with hail pounding on the metal roof, we shifted plans for the next day. Morning obligations required an afternoon meeting, and Mike was already in his boat probing the waters near the ramp when I arrived just before one o’clock.
The morning clouds had cleared and sun shone on what looked like a different lake from that which we had fished in prior months. Seven or eight feet were our best guesses as to how much the water level had risen. A warm sun and light breeze combined to form a perfect shirt-sleeve fishing day.
It was a small shad-colored grub that I first cast into the water, and I was setting the hook before it reached the bottom. We joked about the possibility of a first-cast curse as I released the 12-inch smallmouth, but neither of us was really buying into that.
I had asked Mike the day before what he had been catching his bass on of late, and he said shaky heads. He showed me a small jig head with a sort of miniature cork screw protruding from behind the painted, lead head. A plastic bait was screwed onto the jig head, and the hook was run through the worm until the point was exposed. He had this one rigged with a pumpkinseed Fish Doctor: a smooth French fry-style bait. The bait was fished on the bottom by just shaking it lightly in place on the bottom.
Mike threw a shaky head as I continued to chunk my grub. A school of goggle-eye demonstrated a real liking to my grub, but Mike put a couple of smallies in the boat before we eased around a point to where Mike promised: “There are some big fish on this bank.”
Right on cue, he caught a fat little smallmouth that would weigh at least three and a half pounds. A few minutes later he caught the meanmouth.
“Let me have one of those shaky heads,” I relented.
Mike likes the shaky head for spring smallmouths. In the shallower water he throws a 1/8- ounce head to these shallower fish. He also likes to fish the shaky heads on breaks and channel swings in the fall, but goes to a ¼- to ½- ounce head. Pumpkinseed is pretty much the only color plastic he’ll use on his shaky head rigs, but likes to dip the tails in chartreuse dye.
“You can’t get away with a shaky head on monofilament,” Mike explained. “You feel so many more bites on fluorocarbon. It’s a must to use fluorocarbon.”
Eight-pound test is his personal choice on his home lake for almost every situation.
Soon I was getting in on the act. It took a little while for me to catch on to the way the fish where taking the bait. Almost all of them would grab it and head into deeper water, swimming right at the boat. It’s when you could no longer feel the bait that you reeled in the slack and set the hook. Mike was more adept at this, but I caught on quickly. The bite was steady and the number of fish caught was mounting.
You are probably figuring out by now that we were catching a lot of fish. We guessed about 35 or 40 when it was all over. Besides the two bigger ones that Mike caught, several others fell in that two- to three-pound range. All were smallmouths except one spotted bass and Mike’s meanmouth. The shaky head had done its duty.
As the afternoon wore on, the wind died and thin hazy clouds dulled the sunlight. It felt good on my sunburned arms.
“Man, I hate to leave fish biting like this,” Mike lamented, but we had discussed respective evening obligations that would require our presence. We made a few casts after the time we had set to leave as we grieved over how good the topwater bite was going to be after we left.
It was about 6:30 p.m. when I headed off into the sunset. As I thought back on a glorious day on the water and all the good fish we caught, I just shook my head.
Maybe that’s why they call it the shaky head.