While you Northern guys are chasing turkeys, us Southern cats had to swap over to fishing
My good bud Matt called me a couple weeks back and said he was fishing a tournament and needed a partner, so I said what the heck, I'm in. I haven't fished that particular lake in years and he hasn't either, so I told him we needed to head up last weekend and do alittle scouting. We didn't do much, caught about 8 or 9 small fish, but we found a few promising areas and formed a plan. We checked in Saturday morn about 5am and the wind was already blowing, so we knew it could be a tough day. Our first area wasn't producing, so I told Matt we should burn some water with spinners and cranks to see if we could find a few. Post spawn can be alittle tough at times during the transition period, especially when you know little of the lake. As we burned spinners and cranks for a piece, we came up on a point near a creek channel, so I told Matt I was going to try an ole faithful Chrome with a Black back Rat-L-Trap and see what happened. First cast, BAAM, 3.25 in the boat. We get back situated in the wind and I throw back in the hole and BAAM, a 2lber in the boat. We hung out a while, but couldn't get another strike. We headed for another area and I picked up a couple more keepers on the good ole Rat-L-Trap. It's retie time, so I cut off a few feet of line and dropped my dang Rat-L-Trap in the lake!! I grab my box and guess where my other Chrome with Black backs are? In my boat, at home!! I just sat down shaking my head. I had Smokey, Baby Bass, Fire Tiger, and Crawdad Rat-L-Traps, a bunch of chrome with black cranks, and Matt had about the same. We even had Chrome with Blue back RLTs, no dice, it was just one of those days where that particular chrome with black lit there fire and you would know I didn't have another! Oh well, time to move on to other tactics. We ended up picking up enough keepers for a limit, but I didn't think we'd make it past 1/2 the pack at weigh in. There were 82 guys fishing the tournament(41 teams/boats). We head to the weigh in and find that other guys were having similar luck that day, not many big stringers coming in and hardly any big bass. They were paying out on the top 5 spots, and paying out a $242 pot to big bass and $164 to 2nd place big bass. I was standing twds the end of the line and felt we had around 9lbs in the bag, which would of put us in 3rd and a 3.55 was leading Big Bass. The guy next to me beat us by a few ounces and one of the last guys took out my big bass by a few ounces, but we managed 4th place. We ended up getting alittle more than our entry fee and Matt won a $90 rod as a door prize, so it turned out real well. I was tickled that we were in the running with a small bag, but sometimes it goes that way on a tough bite.
Pretty good start to the fishing season, hopefully it will be a good year.
Good Luck to all of you still turkey hunting and those of you out fishing.
Have a good one,
Reloader
