I showed up the next night and started working around the bridge. Switch out the hardware for a bucktail-dressed single hook and a quality split ring. My solution? I sanded it down and painted it white. Even though there was plenty of light in the water because of the bridge, it wasn’t remotely enough for me to have confidence that a fish could spot the steel’s silhouette. After the bite ended, I threw it a few times and, at 2 ounces, it got to where I needed it to be. What lure cuts through wind, casts a mile, and can stay up in the water column while not rolling in heavy current? It was a short list, and I settled on a 2-ounce Krocodile spoon I had rusting in the bottom of my plug bucket. The fish were there, and we couldn’t reach them. It was a truly frustrating situation, one that I think every bass fisherman has been in. My buddies and I cast like madmen and tried everything in our bags, and we all came up empty-handed. The lures that could cast that far were too heavy to stay in the strike zone. These fish were eating peanut bunker, which were only about 4 inches long, and lures with matching profiles couldn’t make it out there. We were watching big fish blow up in the middle of a channel below a bridge, but there was a strong wind blowing right to left across the casting zone in such a way that the wind was blowing us off the fish. It was well after dark, maybe 2 o’clock in the morning, and the area was loaded with bait. I started asking, “Why not metals?” after an outing last year.

A black spoon will create a strong silhouette against the surface on dark nights.

Fishing with castmaster