How do yall fish standing timber in 10- 25 ft range? My home lake has acres of it but I have never really been able to make it work.
How do yall fish standing timber in 10- 25 ft range? My home lake has acres of it but I have never really been able to make it work.
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Neil Eckberg- Cary, NC - 2008 Skeeter ZX250- 250 Yamaha SHO
Kerr Lake Ba$$hole
Can be awesome fishing with crank baits (especially when there is a clear thermocline). Find thermocline depth with your electronics & try to get your baits to that depth. Bump into everything you can with the bait & Hang-On tight. It can produce BIG especially during the Summer months. Usually quality bites.
The best advice I was ever given on standing timber was to look at the lake map and figure out where I would be fishing if the timber wasn't there. Ignore the timber and concentrate on the bottom structure. Look at the cover the timber provides as a bonus. If you think the fish are on the points with creek channels near them, then the timber only makes that pattern a better one. Once I figure out where the fish are structure wise, I can easily adapt to what part of the timber they are relating to.
Ways to fish it are with crankbaits, deep and shallow. Sometimes large fish will suspend in the tree tops and a large crankbait or spinnerbait will be the ticket. At other times, you'll have to go to the bottom. This is easily done with a texas rig, jig or carolina rig. Sometimes you'll have to fish very close to the trunks and other times the fish will be out in the branches. This can vary with time of day and frontal/post frontal conditions.
I like to fish a big worm on a Fl-rig, on heavy line. Let it fall down the branches and give it a twitch every now and then, but I'm usualy doing this in 50 to 60 ft of water.
Like Kelly I also pretty much ignore standing timber unless it is located in an area on the map which has something else I would fish without the timber there, such as a point, or channel bend etc.
When you see a large area of timber remember that the largest diameter trees are going to be the ones closest to the creek channel running through the area, and I would most likely key on those. I always fish near ledges.
In summer, I fish the upper branches with a Fluke, Trickworm or Senko depening on the action and fall rate I want, to catch the fish that suspend in the limbs. Normally I catch fish between the eurface and 10' or so.
In winter, I like a small Texas rigged finesse type worm like the Finesse worm from Zoom, or the Yamamoto Kuttail, and I rig them with a glass bead between the hook and the weight to create a clicking noise when I shake it down through the limbs, just like working a brushpile. I would also go with a big worm like Shawn said on a Florida rig worked down around the roots of these trees. I prefer the big Yamamoto grubs, which have a good thumping action like the old Ditto gatortails, but a Zoom Big Dead Ringer also works well with the FL rig.
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