Caney Lake was once THE lake to fish for lunker bass, and this angler thinks it’s working its way back to the top of the list of Louisiana trophy lakes.
I walked down to the dock and saw Craig “Bubba” Graham shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun, just staring into the water. Something had his attention.
“I found one,” he shouted to me when he finally noticed me nearing the end of the dock.
He eased his boat around and trolled the 30 or 40 yards to the dock, letting me hop in.
St. Francisville’s Graham then pointed the boat right back to the same spot, positioning it so the sun wouldn’t be in our eyes. And he quickly took up position on the front deck, and went back to staring into the depths of Caney Lake.
When I joined him, I looked down and saw what was so interesting: a bald spot on the lake’s floor 6 feet below the surface.
But that’s not really what had Graham’s attention. I mean, there were beds all over the banks.
And then I saw it — a big shadow hanging right at the edge of the fanned-out bed. When the shadow turned and floated into the bed, I caught my breath and reached for a rod.
The bass was a tank, just slowly cruising over and around the bed.
Graham, who goes by the alias “MadeToGo” on LouisianaSportsman.com, used the remote on his lanyard to lower the two Power Poles mounted on the stern of the boat, locking it into position.
He then started coaching me on the proper approach.
You see, Graham is a sight-fishing junkie. Well, perhaps the better description is that he’s a big-bass junkie, and sight-fishing is the tool he thinks best allows him to get his lunker fix.
“If you’re on the right lake, like Caney, the odds greatly increase to catch big fish versus blind casting,” he explained. “If you look at all the records, the vast majority of the big fish are caught when they are on beds.
“It just greatly increases your odds.”
The bass we were watching was obviously a female: It was just too big to be a buck.
So Graham told me to fire out a white Zoom Ultra Vibe Speed Craw, and I pitched it past the bed and let it settle to the bottom.
I then hopped it to the bed and let it sit, lightly twitching the tip of my flipping stick to make the lure hop in place.
The big girl, now hovering again on the edge of the bed, slowly turned and eyeballed the bait. Then it swam off the bed.
At first, we thought it was leaving the bed altogether, but were elated when we watched the fish make a huge loop and position itself back on the edge of the bed.
“We’ll catch that fish,” Graham predicted.
Several more flips had no discernible impact on the fish. It was still making loops whenever my bait would dance through the bed.
But the bass refused to leave the bald spot, so we knew it was a matter of time.
Finally, Graham said to cast out and use the bait to hit the fish.
It might sound counterintuitive, but I was ready to employ the tactic: It was exactly how I caught an 8-pounder back in the late 1990s while fishing with some buddies on the Tenn-Tom Waterway.
The first time the weighted craw tapped the bass, it just swam away along the same circular pathway it had been using.
Tap No. 2 looked to cause the same reaction, but the loop was a bit tighter.
We both smiled, knowing what was going to happen.
I started firing the lure out, crashing it into the fish and reeling in as fast as I could.
Big Momma was getting pissed, and the circles were tighter and tighter.
Finally, the agitation was clear. The fish wasn’t going to give ground any longer.
When the bait swam toward the fish, it was almost like the bass bloated. At contact, the fish swirled on the bait.
It didn’t inhale it, but it was inevitable.
Several casts, and the bait jumped to the side after being swirled on.
“She’s got it,” Graham said.
However, the bass just had the claws of the plastic craw, and it exhaled the lure quickly.
It reminded me so much of the Tenn-Tom Waterway bass, the hide of which still hangs on my wall. That fish had to be aggravated into responding, and it just nipped at my bait for some time before fully inhaling the lure.
I just kept up the pressure, putting my Speed Craw on the fish, reeling in and putting it back in the water.
And finally, the fish swirled, and the bait disappeared. I didn’t feel a thing, but I jerked the rod tip up as hard as I could.
I felt the satisfying weight on the terminal end of the line, and I knew I had the big girl.
The fish soon was wallowing on the water’s surface, and Graham lipped it into the boat.
It wasn’t quite as heavy as my Tenn-Tom trophy, but at more than 6 pounds it wasn’t a bad fish.
And I saw it eat.
To me, that’s the coolest thing about springtime bed fishing: You’re not blindly casting, guessing if a fish is in the area or not.
You get to look at the fish. You can strategize on how to approach it. You watch it react to your bait. And you see it when it finally inhales the lure.
I can spend half a day working buck bass, and I’m happy.
Graham, however, is after big fish. So every spring he makes the rounds of lakes like Caney in North Louisiana, Okhissa in Mississippi and Texas’ Fork.
He said the key to every big-bass lake is vegetation.
Ironically, he said that’s why he’s been making trips to Caney over the past few years.
Six of the top 10 largemouth bass on record came from this lake, but the fishing was wrecked when grass carp were stocked into the reservoir in the 1990s in huge numbers to knock back an explosion of hydrilla that had taken over much of the lake.
The outcome was a lake devoid of any vegetation, and what had been a fishing mecca became a bass desert.
But Graham said he truly believes it’s on a comeback, with the carp finally dying off and vegetation showing up again.
“If you don’t find (bottom) scum, you don’t find bass or beds,” he said. “I don’t think that anything happened to the fish, but grass brings fish and fishermen together.”
And there definitely was scum along the bottom and signs that grass was beginning to grow again.
Over the course of the couple of days we fished Caney on this trip, we saw untold numbers of beds. The weather didn’t cooperate, with the wind howling and making it difficult to see fish in many of the coves.
So we didn’t catch any true studs, but we saw hundreds of beds and fish all over the place.
But it was clear Graham knew the ins and outs of catching these fish.
“You have to figure out what will make that fish react,” he said. “These fish aren’t feeding, so you have to make them react.
“Once you figure that out, you’ll catch that fish.”
He said that often involves putting a bait in a specific spot on the bed — and every bed is different.
“People talk about a sweet spot,” Graham said. “I say a fish has a couple of attacks, a way she’s going to attack.”
He said experience has taught him that, while fish will move up in waves on moon phases, water temperature is the single-most-important factor in determining when the spawn kicks in.
“I think it’s prime at 64 degrees,” Graham said. “The biologists say 58 degrees, and I’ve caught fish on beds in late January when the temperatures were in the high 50s.
“But I think (the fish) know if they run up there and drop their eggs and the temperature drops down to 55 or 56 that they’ll die.”
