Fishing Report for Wheeler 7-14-16

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On Thursday, I had no intentions of fishing the wildcat tournament out of Ditto. I had to stay home so the furniture repairman could fix our bed. Long story. Aubree had practice later that night. But, rain moved into the area and I began getting texts from my fishing buddies about how the fishing should be really good. The cogs started turning....

So, I hooked the boat up and headed to the ramp after hearing that Aubree's practice was canceled. I was about 10 minutes late so I dropped the trolling motor and started fan casting around the inside of the harbor. Didn't even put my graphs on. About that time, many people were getting off work and were bank fishing. I decided to let them fish since I could go anywhere in the boat and I couldn't.

As can be read, the only pattern that has worked for me in the last few weeks has been crankbaits on bluffs. I made the short run to the upper end of Hobb's Island before I started fishing. Within 5 minutes, I had caught a very nice fish (for the river) on a Zellpop. Now all I needed was four more. 

Going down the bluffs, I caught fish after fish, but none of them measured. Eventually I became frustrated at the amount of 8-10 inch fish. Many of the fish were smaller than the Strike King crank. So, I began to move around and cover some different areas. I didn't get another bite.

With about 30 minutes to go, my wife called me and told me to look up. Sure enough, a nasty storm had moved almost on top of me and I hadn't even seen it.  It was so nasty that I immediately got into the console, fired the big motor up, and headed to the ramp. Since I didn't have my graph, I didn't notice that I was still sitting in about 2 feet of water. That might have prevented me from banging my prop against some rock and putting some nice divots in it. Ugh. But, I had the boat on the trailer before the weather turned nasty. Safety first!

There was one 15 pound bag of fish caught and only two other boats weighed in fish. Both of those limits were small. My one fish went 1.92. The consensus is that the rain really didn't help the bite. Water temps still holding in the mid-80s, no current to speak of. In all, I caught around 7 fish.