Fishing Report for Pickwick 11/2/13

My wife's grandmother was having her yearly tamale cookout on Saturday. She just moved into a lake house on Wilson lake, so naturally I was all about going to the tamale cookout, even though I don't care for them.

But, I got to thinking....my last few trips on Wilson haven't been quite as successful as Past Trips on Wilson.

Pickwick, on the other hand, has been on fire for me since the Government shutdown. I knew we could get into some crank bait fish, which is Alyse's favorite! And, my mother in law offered to take the kids to the lake house for us so that we could make the trip. Check out this report with video!

So, I set the alarm for fairly early, though my experience had told me that the fish don't start biting until about 10 am.

So, we hit the water right at 9, though we had noticed the major whitecaps rolling as we arrived. Not a good sign. Nor was the solid 20 mile an hour wind, which was supposed to be "mild". There wasn't a cloud in the sky and I started to wonder if we had made a wise decision for fishing. The spot I have been catching crank bait fish on is essentially in the middle of the lake. With the high skies, whipping wind, and cold front, I didn't think

Luckily, the fish did what they had been doing...busting shad around grass mats.It sure makes fishing easier when the fish tell you where they are. So, as they started busting, we tossed in a combination of crank baits.  It was obvious that there was a ton of different species of fish roaming. We saw stripe, white bass, smallies, and largemouth all mixed in. Unfortunately, both of us found large stripes that exceeded the 8lb test of our line in the first 5 minutes of fishing. That's what I get for using such small line! Although we did bag several fish, we spend more time picking birds nests out of our reels from throwing against the reel. In fact, we had such a terrible time with the wind that we had to restring both of our reels from terrible kinks.

But, we caught a few fish...without even having to fire the big motor up. After about an hour, I took Alyse to some places that I had found in the previous weeks. We didn't really fish them as the wind was obnoxious. In fact, I ended up losing a rod running down the lake. The waves were so nasty that the rod and reel slipped under the strap and flew right out of the boat. It was one of my last custom rods...in fact, it was my original frog rod, which has caught me more fish than any other rod I own. I almost shed a tear. Maybe a few....

Anyway, the wind laid down just a tiny bit and we went back to where we started. The fish were still there and we caught a few nice ones. We were throwing Strike Kind Series 3s.

Then we had to head to the cookout. The fish weren't as crazy as they had been, but they were still there, when we could cast to them. We only fished for 2 hours but caught a fair amount!