Finding something as small as a chinquapin in the middle of a big reservoir like Grand Bayou is kind of like looking for a — well, you know.
But Eddie Halbrook said it’s a lot easier to find a chinquapin than it is that needle.
Yeah, he’s got it all mapped out and marked now, but when he first started fishing Grand Bayou for chinquapin, he was just like everybody else who didn\’t have the foggiest idea where to start.
“A lot of trial and error,” he said. “But I didn\’t just go out there and pick a good spot and start fishing. What I did was try to put the odds in my favor by fishing some areas that I thought might be attractive to fish.”
The first thing he did was head to the grass. Grand Bayou has some coontail and hydrilla in it, and Halbrook headed straight to the edges of that vegetation.
Dropping an underwater camera in, he saw all the proof he needed to spend a lot of time fishing the edges of the grass.
Since these grass edges can appear in different locations each year, Halbrook started searching for some spots that he knew would hold chinquapin year in and year out.
“I moved to the points,” he said. “But I never could get on much fishing the ends of the points. When I moved to the sides, there they were.”
Halbrook reasoned that the sides of the points have some kind of underwater dynamic that the tips just didn\’t have.
“Some of these creeks brush up right against the edges of these points, and chinquapin love to hang out on those edges,” he explained. “Then they move up on the flat between the creek and the point and on up into shallow water to spawn.”
Obviously, finding some grass on the edges of the points is a no-brainer. That’s why Halbrook recommended anybody fishing Grand Bayou for the first time spend a little time riding around and finding these kinds of spots before dropping a worm in the water.