Post-spawn

The population splits. Males stay shallow guarding fry and will attack anything that comes near a school of them. Larger females pull out to the first drop-off and suspend, doing very little, so big fish get hard to catch for a few weeks.

Slow and natural is the working approach for the females: weightless soft plastics, a slow-falling jig, a fluke worked over deeper cover. For the males, a small topwater or a swimbait around fry balls in the shallows still produces.

Bluegill move onto their own beds around this time, which gives bass an obvious food source and explains why bluegill-pattern jigs and swim jigs work so well.

It does not last. Once the females recover and shad start schooling, the summer patterns take over and fishing gets predictable again. The reputation post-spawn has for being impossible is partly a matter of anglers fishing spawn patterns two weeks too long.