Deep Deadsticking - Part 3
September 9, 2008
Let's begin another fun episode of deep deadsticking. As we've described it so far, it's fishing with a wacky weightless Senko dropped through and deadsticked under schools of bait like shad, smelt, shiners or other such open water pelagic baitfish species. Once the Senko alights on bottom, there's no such thing as waiting too long. Quite a few seconds may tick by, but just do nothing but wait, and wait some more. Gamefish will be scouring the bottom beneath and behind the bait schools for any individuals that fell out or could not keep up with the school. That's when they'll find your wacky Senko perched patiently on the bottom.
A baitfish like a shad, its best protection is to stay in the school. Safety in numbers shall we say. Once an individual falls out, is injured by a gamefish or otherwise can't keep up with the school, it becomes exposed. A sitting duck. A primary target.
About the only other protection a slow, injured or left behind shad has is to try to make it to the bottom. There, it has one last chance to tuck itself into any nook or cranny or crevice, behind or beneath a rock, or bury itself deep in aquatic vegetation or brush, hopefully to recuperate and catch up with the school later.
Only problem, gamefish tirelessly patrol and root out these hidden morsels that tuck themselves into the bottom beneath and behind bait schools. Gamefish bide their time. They let the bait school go by without alarming or stampeding it. They really do want the school to stay in the area. It's their meal ticket. It's a well-stocked pantry. So they let the school saunter safely out of sight like a passing parade. Then they sweep the bottom clean behind the school, betting they'll be some individual baitfish that dallied or didn't or couldn't keep up.
It's a high stakes game of hide-and-seek that these desperate solitary baitfish mostly lose. Yet life is precious and not even a small baitfish will relinquish it easily. However hidden on the bottom, they're still sitting ducks, disoriented, confused, possibly injured and can't really swim well or fast. Their only chance is to hide quietly - hardly moving at all - and pray the gamefish can't quite dig them out due to the difficult bottom structure or cover they've tightly tucked themselves into.
The gamefish are patient and their search thorough. They know these baitfish are helpless on the bottom and can't leave. There's no way out of this pickle for the bait.
That's when the relentlessly-searching gamefish eventually come across your wacky weightless Senko that you've been deadsticking for the longest time. In contrast to the uneventful waiting time, the lunging strike can be hard when a bass finally finds it!
Deep is a relative term, and a weightless wacky Senko can be effective down to about twenty feet. Deeper than that, or if the wind is a problem, I wacky rig the Senko not weightless, but with a 1/16th or 1/8th oz Yamamoto Round Head jig. Since I am not using the jig's lead keeper collar (just wacky rig the Senko on the round bend of the jig hook), I may squeeze, mash and twist the lead collar off with pliers and dispose of it properly. That leaves only the round lead part. I fancy this modification lets the remaining spherical ball pendulum back and forth with more action as the wacky Senko now vibrates and parachutes toward the bottom like a hang glider above the rocking round jig head. This "wacky jig head" set-up lets you deadstick a wacky Senko deeper than twenty feet, limited only by your patience! It usually hits bottom with the exposed hook upright, and the crossways wacky Senko helps keeps the hookpoint out of snags.
Even when gamefish are actively charging through balls of bait high up in the water column (including breaking water on top), deep deadsticking on bottom beneath a mid-water melee still works swell. You hardly have to be delicate here. Instead of a Senko, I switch to the five-inch white pearl with silver flake skirted double tail Yamamoto Hula Grub (97-10-031) on a 1/2 to 1 ounce Yamamoto Football Head, the heavier the better.
Just use your graph and motor directly over the bait balls being attacked. Drop the heavy white jig right into them. Hit the bottom and... do absolutely nothing.
If you don't drift off them, if you can still see the underwater escapades on your graph, the scenario will change from second to second. The bait ball will explode on screen like Fourth of July fireworks as bass streak like missiles through them. And almost as quickly, the bait ball implodes in upon itself again, reforming into a dense black ball on the graph.
Like looking through a kaleidoscope, the images on the graph appear fascinating although jumbled and distorted, forming a new shape at every turn. To us, this kind of feeding frenzy may appear as chaotic and an every-shad-for-itself free-for-all. Not true. To the bass and bait, it's routine maneuvering and carefully orchestrated. It's what bass and bait do daily.
As chaotic and random as such feeding behavior may appear to us, it isn't. Gamefish that are blitzing do not act as individuals. Instead, they act instinctively in unison with a singular collective and collaborative psyche. They function within small groups, waves or vanguards, but also maintain an awareness of the overall larger assembly. So when you witness wild action on the surface or on the graph that seems disorganized and haphazard to us, if we could actually clearly see everything going on under the water, it is likely that the separate smaller groups of gamefish are decked out in flights and formations and stratified into layers, some surface, some deep with synchronized swimming and precise timing intervals between the groups. They're going onto the field, following the cut of the terrain to get there, trying to encounter and keep the prey in or move them toward the most conducive spot for eating the prey. Simultaneously, the bait are constantly regrouping toward the most defensible or evasive use of the underwater terrain. A blitz seems like confusion to us, but to the fish, both predator and prey, it is a very orderly experience with precisely-orchestrated, instinctive movements. To them, it's just what they do. It's the normal everyday routine.
As chaotic as a blitz may seem to us, even at the height of the engagement, have you ever seen one fleeing baitfish collide with another? They usually don't. Rest assured, baitfish are not nearly as panic-stricken as we imagine them to be in a blitz. They're simply retracing the proven, evasive maneuvers that their species has always taken since time immemorial to consistently thwart predators.
Of course for the prey, they'd rather not be charged, but the blitz isn't as one-sided as it may seem. Prey also cunningly use the terrain to disadvantage the predators. The prey positions themselves in hard-to-attack and easy-to-escape locations, and otherwise use their own collective movements to make it difficult for the gamefish to grab them. In the final result, the tremendous effort expended by the gamefish can be self-defeating, and the prey will win if the predators cannot gain more food energy than they expend during the blitz. At some point in every blitz, the gamefish will realize they are losing more than winning, and unceremoniously call it quits. In between charges, the gamefish muster off a point or prominent ledge or focal location and instinctively determine whether to continue launching raids or whether they've had enough. At some point, they'll stop, and simply collect and rest. Ultimately, the entire army may retreat further from the field of battle toward a sanctuary where they'll lay low, camp out, de-stress and recuperate fully from the blitz event.
What's important is we've just talked of pelagic, open water bait balls as being tied to some bottom structure, and that's true. More often than not, bait balls are not out there in the middle of nowhere, but 'anchored' to some sort of advantageous bottom piece that is their lifeline. We may not be able to see through the water or decipher on our electronic exactly what that desirable bottom feature may be, but bait balls will almost always be using something, anything there to give them an edge.
A problem with using a trolling motor to get directly over such deep bait and underwater blitzes with your graph is that once you see it on the screen, you've sailed past what's going on. It's often effective in non-tournament fishing to troll around with a heavy white jig already lowered near the bottom. Just keep your line in the water as you troll, then free spool it to bottom after you graph over the deep bait and bass. The boat will sail past, but once you get the knack of dropping your 'anchor' in the right spot, the heavy jig will be perfectly positioned although the boat may drift out of place as you freespool.
There's really not much more you need to do then, except wait and wait some more. The gamefish vacuuming the bottom clean of all the injured and disoriented fall-out, these heavy hoovers tend to be bigger on average than the gamefish that charge the bait up higher in the water column. This even applies when bait are being hit on the surface. There's nowhere else for a shad that's injured on the surface to go except down to the bottom and wedge itself into a crack. That's a prime position dominated by bigger bass - and the domain of deep deadsticking. Just cast your heavy hula grub into the surface-feeding school and pray it won't get hit by a dink before the jig thuds down safely in the big bass zone.
There's nothing quite like watching the clouds blow by - or watching a surface-feeding or mid-depth carnage on your graph for 20 or 30 seconds until suddenly a behemoth finds your jig on bottom and viciously tries to rip your arm off.
You can deep deadstick the bait balls winter, spring, summer and fall. Get good at it and you may find there's no better bass-holding structure or cover.
Click here to read more:
- Part 1: Deep Deadsticking
- Part 2: Deep Deadsticking
- Part 3: Deep Deadsticking
- Part 4: Deep Deadsticking By Jim Gildea
- Part 5: Deep Deadsticking By Jeff Gustafson