There are a lot of times mid-summer that fishing docks can be very successful. If you are having trouble finding fish somewhere, grinding out docks for a day could be the way to fill your live well. How you fish docks, can be the difference of a 5 fish limit for 15 pounds, or 3 fish for 6 pounds. 

A lot of the time when you see people fish docks they will just cruise past the end of a dock and pitch around it and move on to the next one. If you want to have more success at fishing docks it is important to pick them apart. From the picture, you can see that when I fish a dock I like to approach as close to the shore as it takes to get under every section of the dock. I then work my way all around the dock and lift before moving on to the next one. This allows you to fish all the cover provided by the dock and hit it from every angle ensuring that if there is a fish there, you are more likely to get a bite. Another big key is to get your bait under the dock and not just around it. A lot of times those big fish are hiding way under the dock or the lift and it takes some practice to get your bait back in those tough spots. A couple of baits that I would recommend for this is a C to C Baits Little D jig with a creature trailer, or a tube bait. Both baits are great for skipping and make it much easier to get into those tough spots that you couldn’t hit by just flipping your bait in there.

  Another key to fishing these baits in mid-summer is to make sure that you are dragging them slowly along the bottom. Mid-summer bass can often be lethargic and take a slow-moving bait that must be right in front of their face to eat it. I like to use the Little D jig because of its smaller profile, and the way the bait sits on the bottom. When it sits on the bottom the trailer stands up at a 60-degree angle to the bottom, representing a defensive look of a crawfish. Often when a fish under a dock bites, it just grabs on to the bait and sit with it in its mouth. So, practice is the best way to tell if it’s a fish, or something on the bottom that the bait is caught up on. Once that fish is on it is important to get it out from under the dock as quick as possible to prevent it from burying itself in the dock and getting you tangled in dock rails or lift members.

-Patrick Rohlfing