Small Spots, Big Fish

Shaded-relief electronic charts can lead you to small, little-known structure pieces that produce big results.

- Ron Ballanti

Get ready to drop, we're just about there," said friend and longtime mentor Jim Hendricks. His eyes were glued to the screen of his multifunction display, the screen split to show both his chirp sonar and C-Map Reveal shaded-relief chart. Just as the chart display showed our boat nosing toward the edge of a small rock, the sounder display indicated the bottom was getting harder and coming up a few feet. After idling forward a few more feet and then bumping the boat in reverse to slow our slide, our lures were headed to the bottom.

It didn't take long for my "donkey rig"-two 12-ounce Hookup Baits tube lures. rigged in tandem-to reach the subtle piece of structure 120 feet below us. The one-two punch came on the second gentle jigging motion of the rod tip, the 7-foot graphite rod doubling over, and the spinning reel begrudgingly spilling braided line under the heavy pressure of two 5-pound barred sand bass.

Catching one fish of this class over a day of fishing off the Southern California coast is a noteworthy achievement. Having two of them on the line at once qualifies as an embarrassment of riches. However, this is the kind of experience you can expect when you focus on fishing small structure spots that other anglers might overlook.