Prefishing for the Gambler Tournament 10/27

I won't complain too much about the weather down here in the South, as compared to the weather that the north east is seeing. I sure won't complain too much about how it effected my fishing when so many people are struggling.

But, I will sat that the weather on Saturday was just terrible.

Josh and I planned on doing a little pre-fishing for the Gambler Tournament that takes place this weekend 11/3. Let me tell ya. These bait manufactures are great ideas. Sure, its great for we fishermen, since it's free. But, it's great advertisement for the manufactures. By far the BEST thing for them is, those of us that don't normally buy their baits are forced to load up on them.

You can check my link here:
http://best5zach.blogspot.com/2012/10/gamber-baits-free-tournament-on.html

Or go to their website here:
http://www.gambler-bang.com/

Anyway. It was sprinkling rain and 43 degrees when I left the house to pick Josh and the Bullet up. We stopped at Keller's Outdoors and grabbed a biscuit and a few baits. Josh had told me about this bologna biscuit they had. I had envisioned normal bologna. Nope. This was thick cut, smoked, yummy bologna on a soft biscuit. It was excellent.

We decided to put in at Allreds. We hit the water and the wind hit us. It was 25-20mph. Cold. We started out on a grass topped hump where I had success in the past. About that time, a big tournament came blazing by. I recalled that NATA had their Classic today, though it turned out that it was the BFL. More about that later. Fishing the shallow humps was a chore. So, we moved and started fishing some creeks, as we had expected the baitfish and bass to start migrating. Plus, the added benefit to being out of the wind. We didn't have a hit, and strangely enough, we didn't see any baitfish.

Weird.

We stopped into a few more creeks. Tried some different things. Nothing. No bass busting baits. No baits flipping around. Frustrated, I suggested we do the last thing we normally would think of. Let's go find a deep water hump, try and stay on it, and see what happens.

Just so happened that there was a nearby hump that showed up on the graph. It was pretty small, but sat just off the main channel and adjacent to a creek channel. Josh tossed a crank bait at it and stuck a NICE keeper. I'd say a high 3 or low 4 fish.

But that presented a problem. It took several minutes to reposition, and even then, we weren't in the right spot. He said he had hit a rock and bounced the crank off it to trigger the strike. Good fish like that have been hard to come by on Guntersville. And usually where there is one fish like that, there are more. We idled over it and the depth finder didn't seem to pick out anything. But, the readings looked funny. There seemed to be two lines of "hard bottom" on the graph in very specific places. In fact, the places where we expected to see fish were the only places that had this intermittent high density indication on top of a solid hard bottom line. Also, where we expected to see baitfish bunched up, we saw a lot of low density indications stretched up and down the water column. Almost like when there is some grass on your sensor. Then we figured it out. Measurable fish were holding tight to the bottom and the baitfish were suspended vertically, not bunched up.

Liking what we saw, we left it after deciding that it would be our first stop. Having new found success and faith in the jig, I decided that I would throw a jig behind Josh's bait selection. He could grab the quick eaters and I could pick off the more lethargic fish. That is provided that there ARE fish there. They WANT to eat. And, wind won't keep us off of the spot.

That presented a problem, since you must use Gambler jigs. No one in town carries them that I know of. Tacklewarehouse didn't have any. Luckily, Amazon did! And, I have this new Prime membership. So, free shipping!

I won't bore you with the rest of the day, suffice to say that we didn't make a great bag, but we quit around 11am. We did have a few bites and I believe we could have ground out a limit.

According to the BFL's website, you needed 15 pounds to take home a check. That's 15 pounds over 2 days. Folks, that should tell you all you need to know about the lake. Now, I admit that there were some decent bags brought in. The winner had 39 pounds 11 ounces to win it. Solid. 29 pounds took home a grand.

I hear the results for NATA were just as bad. I talked to a friend who goes to church with me and he said it was real tough for them.

Seems like the lake was tough for everyone. Again.

But, we are going into this tournament just like it's a regular fishing trip. Never mind the money we spent on the baits.

Will update next week!