Stick Them During the Shad Spawn

Keying in on the shad spawn can be a great way to put a couple of keepers in the boat during the early morning hours of your tournament once your water starts to heat up. When the water temps reach around 70 the shad start to spawn. Shad will run up on banks with hard surfaces like rip rap, clay, and sometimes sea walls to lay their eggs. If you are observant often you can spot shad jumping out of the water as they make their way down the bank laying their eggs. The fish will be right up on the bank so your bait selection is fairly limited because you are looking to run and gun and catch active fish with this technique as it is best during the low light morning hours.

One of the best baits to have tied on is a spinnerbait. If you have clear water try one with double willow leaf blades and a white skirt to start. This will give you a lot of flash and let you fish it very quickly through areas getting those active fish to strike. I like to take the spinnerbait and burn it and then kill it. A lot of times when you kill it they will smash it. My rod of choice is a 7 foot Medium Heavy AiRRUS Co-Matrix Rod with a high speed 7.1 reel.

My second bait of choice would have to be a shallow running square bill crankbait like a Lucky Craft Rick Clunn 1.5 or a Smack Tackle Gizz 4. As far as colors go I pretty much stick to a white with a black back to imitate the shad. I try to get the bait to hit off the rocks and I fish it very erratic mixing in some twitches here and there. My rod choice is a 7 foot Medium AiRRUS Copperhead Rod with a 7.1 reel.

One last bait to have tied up is a swim jig. I will throw white to try and imitate the shad but but I've had a lot more success on a black and blue swim jig. I think the whole key behind it is the fish don't get as good a look at it. What I do with the swim jig is I throw it parallel to the bank and give it some twitches on the retrieve back to the boat. It can work better than a spinnerbait some days because it doesn't have as much flash. Check out the OMEGA Revelation Swim Jig for your jig swimming. For my swim jig fishing I use a 7 foot Medium Heavy AiRRUS Co-Matrix Rod with a 7.1 burner reel.

Fishing the shad spawn is an often overlooked pattern that happens on every lake. Shad are already starting to spawn on some of the lakes down south. A couple of my buddies down at the lake have seen the shad getting up on the bank already so now is the time to get out. Good Fishing and God Bless!