18 Tricks to Get into Super Shallow Fishing Backwaters

By Shaye Baker / Wire2Fish

I was born and raised in shallow fishing backwaters—like super shallow. It’s what my dad first learned to do, so it’s what he first taught me. While pushing my boat recently, after having beached it on a sandbar with my trolling motor, I had the idea come to me to write a piece on how to access super shallow fishing backwaters in a bass boat.

Dad’s affinity for the shallows came from how he fished as a kid, walking the banks of ponds and rivers and wading through creeks, dad learned to fish while targeting bass that rarely saw artificial lures. As he moved to an aluminum boat in his 20s and eventually to a fiberglass boat in his 30s, he couldn’t shake the urge to venture as far back into these same creeks as he could, trying to connect the dots between the angler he was at the time and the angler he had been.

Picking his way into shallow creeks and finding little hidey hole ponds, dad had a lot of success fishing throughout Alabama; his most noteworthy examples being a 1988 Alabama B.A.S,S. Nation State Championship victory on the Alabama river fishing an acre-or-two oxbow off the main river, and a 2002 State Championship in less than 3 feet of water on his home waters of Lake Martin. CONTINUE