If you want to experience some of the best bass fishing of the year, the springtime period around the spawn is one of your best opportunities. Many anglers believe the prime time is when the water temperatures rise into the 60s and bass make spawning beds in the shallows. However, Mercury Pro Team member Mark Zona prefers the late prespawn period immediately before the spawn. To him, this window is far better for catching quantity and quality bass.
“Two or three weeks before they even begin making beds is when bass really lose their minds in the shallows, eating everything in sight,” Zona said. “It’s a phenomenon I’ve witnessed across the country for years. Bass move up to rid the spawning grounds of pesky nest robbers, such as bream and crawfish, by eating as many of them as possible.”
When to Target Prespawn Bass in Spring
Zona refers to this special window as the “annihilation period.”
“Certainly, they want to feed up before the spawn,” he said. “But I believe their primary objective is to inhale all the potential intruders in the general spawning area, thereby exhibiting some of the fiercest eating aggression of the year.”
Zona finds that both male and female bass partake in this aggressive “scrubbing” of their spawning grounds. Since females are generally bigger than males – and are at their heftiest weight of the season – this provides an opportunity for anglers to catch their biggest bass of the year or even set a new personal best.
The best time to fish this pattern is when the water temperature first tops the 50-degree mark, with 51 to 58 degrees being Zona’s prime temperature range. By the time the water gets into the 60s, Zona finds that the prespawn bass schools break up into pairs, and the fish transition to spawning. Then they become more defensive about their own bed rather than feeding aggressively throughout an entire spawning bay, pocket or flat.
The Best Areas to Target Bass in Spring
A couple of weather cues to watch for during this early spring period are warmer nights and south winds between cold fronts. And the best places to fish are south-facing shorelines, flats, protected spawning bays and pockets. Depending on water clarity, the most productive depths can range from 1 to 6 feet.
“It’s amazing when you find this prespawn bite,” added the host of Zona’s Awesome Fishing Show. “Bass become like packs of wolves devouring everything in their path. It’s so much fun because once you find a pack of them, you can make multiple casts to the same area and get throttled cast after cast. After catching several, you begin to understand how much more aggressive this bite is compared to other times of the year.”
