Why I Chase Schools of Fish

You can learn a lot about your retrieves, weights of lures and more with schools of fish

One of the main things I love about winter fishing is the colder weather generally drives fish into deeper depths and groups them up a lot more. This can give you a lot of opportunity to test lures, experiment with crossover baits and fine tune your retrieves and presentations. If you can learn to make lethargic fish bite you can make anything bite.

So learning to find schools of fish will help you improve your fishing in more ways than one. So I will talk some on how I search for schools of fish, what experiments I will do while fishing for a school and how that helps with the next school I find.

The video above talks through finding a school of crappie on deep channel swing off the main river.

HOW TO FIND SCHOOLS OF FISH

Schools of fish generally happen when you move away from the spawn. A school of fish offers smaller fish protection and offers larger fish more efficiency when hunting baitfish. Many creatures from fish to animals hunt in packs or schools to make the hunts more efficient and some do it simply because they are competitive when it comes to eating. So if one predator is after something to eat, then it often draws in more predators to chase the same things.

I am generally relating my searches to channels and feeding flats. I’m going to delve into the topic of “focusing on fringes” in a future article, but for now I will say if you can find areas that lead into and out of feeding areas than you increase the likelihood that you will run into schools of fish.

Why is this? Well for starters your fish are either feeding or taking a break from feeding. When they are feeding they are generally corralling bait into feeding areas. And when they are not, they are generally sitting just outside of the feeding areas resting.

What is a feeding area? That’s a good question. To me a feeding area is simply an area where the predator fish have an advantage on the forage. Or it is simply an area where the forage congregates and where the predators know they will find a concentration of forage. This can be related to current, cover or just water quality in general. But generally speaking a lot of feeding areas are higher flatter areas adjacent to current flows and deeper water where forage can move up and feed on algae and zooplankton. And in turn the fish can move up and feed on the forage.

So those shallower flatter areas off the deep water channels can be the best places to relate your searches for schools of fish.

EXPERIMENT WITH SCHOOLS OF FISH

I will get into these areas of transition, feeding and rest and work back and forth until I find a school of fish and then I will begin my experimenting with lures and retrieves. If it’s crappie I’m going to start with a jig and color that has worked for me in the past. I might start with a 1/16 ounce jighead with something like a ShoNuff Crappie Magnet and end up with a 1/32 ounce Trout Magnet in Charteuse and White depending on how the fish react to my initial presentations.

I will play with reeling slowly through the school, dropping directly on the school or a combination of drops and lifts to see what the fish react to best. Changing your size of jig as well as the weight of your head affects how the bait presents to the fish.

Sometimes you can find crossover lures that work well for one thing that also work well for schools of fish. The last few years I’ve experimented with small trout minnow baits for crappie and gills, jigging spoons and trout spoons for deep winter fish, and more. You will sometimes find a bait that exceeds your expectations that the fish react really well to.

It can also be related to color. I started out fishing for gills a couple trips back and was using a hand-tied bluegill bug. I was around a lot of fish but not getting enough bites. I swapped to a Trout Magnet in the new Natural color and started catching every single cast. I was pretty shocked how well a simple profile and color change got following fish to become aggressive biting fish.

I have developed a lot my staple presentations, colors and retrieves over the years by experimenting with groups of fish.

That leads you to a lot more success as you find more and more schools of fish. I try to spend a portion of every trip, looking at new areas that I have not scanned and looked for fish before or at that time of year. Sometimes you can find a really great area but you aren’t in the right season for that area to be productive. I have found some stuff in the summer where I came back in the winter to find some of the biggest schools I’ve ever seen.

You learn the potential of areas related to how the intersect adjacent areas and figure out there are certain seasons where good looking areas will be most productive. So it’s always worth it to search areas and mark interesting looking stuff for later inspection if you don’t find schools of fish in that season.

I also believe that knowing really good areas in one season can lead you to good adjacent areas in a different season. For instance, if I know a lot of fish come into one area to spawn, then I know they might be on the deep adjacent area after in the summer or prior to in the winter. So again a lot of my fishing is working back and forth between where I knew they were and where I think they are going. Somewhere along those paths, you will find schools of fish.

That’s also why channels can be so key to finding obvious routes to and from the areas you know fish use in other seasons. Sometimes this is a pinch point like maybe under a bridge coming into or going out of a small creek. Sometimes it’s simply first third, or last third in a creek depending on the weather patterns and seasons.

But if you can find schools of fish in the tougher seasons (like summer and winter) you can piece together how the fish migrate in and out in the higher productivity seasons (spring and fall).