Major League Fishing pro Edwin Evers has dropped the May 2026 episode of his "Where to Start" series, and rather than pull apart a single tournament fishery he has tackled one of the trickier problems on the calendar — the river spawn. The Oklahoma pro's subscriber-suggested list this month delivered three rivers Evers has never fished but said he would love to: the Columbia River in Washington, a stretch of the Ohio between Pomeroy Point and Ravenswood, and the Alligator River in coastal North Carolina.
"I'll give you a million bucks if you can go catch a bass within an hour. The one spot that I'm going to run to on this body of water that I have seen is this deal right here," Evers said, hovering Google Earth on a long Columbia River backwater with an old road running down its centre. "I have got something — an old road that runs down the center of this canal. They are going to spawn on that thing like every year. Like to me, if I had to go catch a bass, that's the spot that I'm going to go catch one."
The video's underlying thesis is straightforward: river spawn fish have to find water out of the main current. Evers laid that out without hedging. "Out of direct current, you've got to get in if it's going to be smallmouth, a secondary minimal current. If it's largemouth guys, the best spots out of the current — dead-end sloughs, dead-end canals, dead-end stuff where there's not a lot of current," he said. He acknowledged the trade-off — backwaters often lack the harder bottom that bedding bass demand — but argued that stable water trumps substrate when bass have to nest in a system that can flood at any time.
For the Columbia, Evers picked marinas as the no-brainer first stop because they sit hard against the main river channel where smallmouth spend the rest of the year. He liked steep rip-rap, hard banks and an inside bend featuring a deep pocket tucked behind a hard-to-access entrance — a sneaky depression he believes "will load with any fish that's within a half mile of it." His highest-confidence pick remained the centre-line road in the big backwater.
The Ohio drew a more cautious read. "I feel like this stretch of the Ohio River is going to have a lot of smallmouth in it. It's probably your predominant species," Evers said, before offering a frank assessment of the floodplain. "You men and women that fish the Ohio River, I feel sorry for you. Like you guys are like the cream of the crop, the best of the best because you're having to fish for a very small population of bass. There's just not a lot of spawning habitat in there." He flagged a small backwater pond that drains only ten acres as a high-confidence shallow-spawn spot, alongside the back side of islands, sand depressions on outside bends and a fertilised drainage channel running off a golf course.
The Alligator River drew the most enthusiasm. Evers noted that the Albemarle Sound holds remarkably little tide despite its proximity to the Atlantic, and that wind drives more water movement than the tide cycle does. With an 18-mile-long body of water to break down, he steered viewers into a vast wind-protected backwater on the inside of the system, where dozens of small drainages fall off harder bottom edges into the main flat. "I am going to fish around these points... because that's going to be a harder bottom. Current, wind-driven current going in and out," he said.
Evers conceded that southerly latitudes such as North Carolina may already be wrapping the spawn by May, but argued that wind-driven points and drainage mouths will hold post-spawn fish staging back to the main lake regardless of what the calendar says. He closed the May 2026 episode with the line that defines river bass fishing — they "either really early or really late," and the angler who finds stable, low-flow water gets the shots.