Photo by Ron Sinfelt

The aquatic grass that gets the most credit for helping turn Shearon Harris Lake into a crackerjack bass-fishing lake is hydrilla.

However, the aquatic grass that will have the biggest impact on anglers’ success this month is a viney, leafy mess called “primrose” that grows along the bank.

And to top it off, most of the primrose won’t even be alive -- but it still attracts a great many big bass that are staging before the spawn.

“April is a good month; the best fishing really gets started in late February and March, but in April, they’re going to be looking to spawn, and by the end of the month, they’ll be in full spawn,” said guide Phil Cable of Holly Springs.

“It’s typically a shallow bite, and there are not many times when fishermen can throw just about anything they want to and catch fish. There aren’t a lot of stumps; it’s pretty much the old vine.

“The primrose will be greening up, but you can fish through it. They’ll stage on the outside edge of the old vines, but they can be anywhere up underneath it.”

Cable, whose Web Site is at PhilCableGuideService.com, said that fishing the primrose is one of two main patterns he likes to run in April on Shearon Harris. He’s still partial to working a deep-diving crankbait on drops in the 8- to 10-foot range, looking for those pre-spawn fish that have not moved into the shallows. Harris is a bit of an unusual lake in that there aren’t too many true “transition” sections -- a bass can go from 10 feet deep to 4 feet deep in a single move toward the shallows.

“Years ago, the early spring was when I was throwing a deep-diving crankbait and catching so many fish,” said Cable, who once used a crankbait to win a spring team tournament on Harris with 10 bass that pushed the 60-pound mark -- not long before Dennis Reedy of Sanford and his partner won another tournament with a gargantuan 10-fish, 72-pound catch. “It’s good to take a look for some of those fish; I wouldn’t discount that bite. I look for it when I go, regardless of how good the shallow bite is. But I’m not in real deep water -- more like 8 to 10 feet.”

Cable’s favorite deep-diving plugs are Poe’s Series 300 and 400 in the popular “homer” color -- chartreuse with a green back. But he’s not nearly as likely to be filling out a big limit of bass these days with a lure that dives too deeply. Most of the time, he’s probing water no deeper than 4 or 5 feet -- and often, much shallower. He fishes a spinnerbait in the vines and a shallow-running crankbait, lipless crankbait, jerkbait or Senko-type bait along the outside edges.

“I like to fish a Berkley Gulp Sinking Minnow in and around those old primrose vines, and a spinnerbait will also work real good,” Cable said. “You can still fish a spinnerbait through and around the primrose. I just work it through the vines. I let it get down in there -- I don’t work it on the surface. At that time of the year, all you’ll have there are the (plant) stalks anyway.”