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I've done a lot of structure work over the years, and a good amount with manual placement of rocks. Talk about a labor of love shucking stone. I feel with rock, you can never do enough though.

The places I've seen smallies spawn have not been the areas I've made though. There are a lot of rockish areas and the one area where I saw a few different locations of smallies on bed were on a kind of thin rock ledge, maybe a 1' to 2.5' lip that runs along a long edge of my pond. The depth of that lip runs from 6" to 2' depending on the level of the pond. In the spring it's usually 1.5' to 2' deep. It is all over hung with brush and not easy to stand by on land due to a steep grade.

It's the shoreline behind me and to the left.


One year, I saw two smallies maybe 17-19" long on a bed together with a longer LMB in the bed right in between them; they were all squeezed onto this ledge. A few bluegill kept darting in from the adjacent deep water and and swiping eggs from the nest.