Read about all of my Fishing Adventures!
Check out my Fish of 2014
Follow my Fish of 2015
Been a minute since I checked in! Sorry about that guys! See, my wife was driving my Yukon to work one day and a buck decided to commit suicide by jumping in front of it. The truck was totaled and I am too cheap to go get a car payment, since I haven't had one in years.
Anyway, that has put me at a disadvantage to fishing. That isn't to say I haven't been fishing, because I have. In fact, being unable to get out on the water has led to me fishing my uncle's pond about twice a week. I have been out on Wilson twice since the Classic, which you can read about by clicking the link below.
Anyways, the two trips on Wilson have been really tough. I have been unable to use what I have learned about fishing the dam, other than to say that I know that 12,000 CFS is the bare minimum to even bother putting the boat in the water and that there is a certain sequence of generators that must be running, otherwise you are wasting your time.
That doesn't mean we haven't caught fish. We did. But not a lot. One trip saw us catch about 10, all largemouth. The next saw us catch about the same, but all smallmouth. Ironically, the largemouth were at the dam and the smallies came from downriver on creek channels. Weird.
Anywho, I convinced Josh to fish a black friday tournament with me out of Fleet Harbor. You could fish Wheeler, Wilson or Pickwick. As we crossed Wilson dam, we noticed that Pickwick was stupid low, as was Wheeler. I don't have much luck with low water and Wilson seemed to be at usual levels. So, we checked in and ran to the dam.
There was a line of about six boats on the eddy line, which seemed to be the right generators. On the second cast of the day, a fish slammed my crankbait. I was trying to keep it quiet so no one would notice it. I was so quiet that Josh didn't even hear me until I started hollerin' that the fish had gone around the motor (I was on the back of the boat). That's when I saw it. A gorgeous six pound largemouth. And just like that, the fish pulled off.
Two hours, we weren't catching and neither was anyone else. More telling was that we weren't catching any trash fish.
We drifted down to the powerlines which is where I had some luck weeks before. We noticed a group of boats another three hundred yards down river. We didn't know what to make of it, though I noticed that it was the same place we had seen catfishermen a few weeks before. Except these were bass boats. Still, I didn't have the first clue what they were doing and didn't want to get involved in the crowd.
Then, I started hitting the spot. First it was a decent smallie. Then Josh picked up a smallie. Then a string of five largemouth. The issue was that they were getting smaller until they weren't measuring. Still, we had a limit. As we were retrieving Josh's hung up lure, I picked up a Pop-R and skipped it under the powerlines, just as a joke. And sure enough, a MASSIVE bass exploded on it. I pretended it was a carp or a gar or anything other than a largemouth cause it was a six-plus fish. But, I caught it all on video and, sure enough, it was a bass. Sigh.
For the last three hours we couldn't get bit. We still had some decent fish and we headed to the weigh in thinking that maybe we had a chance to squeak out a check on what we thought was a rough day.
Nope. The winning weights were 25, 24 and 20 pounds. We measured four fish for 11 pounds. I know every fisherman likes to talk about the fish they lost and I'm not one for making mistakes, but it hurt losing those fish. Still, it wouldn't have mattered. Even with the two fish we lost, I was looking at less than 20, so, it's a moot point.
But, on the bright side, I was telling Josh that at least we are to the point where we are losing the winning fish instead of scratching out losing limits. We ended up catcing around 10 fish, nine of which came on Strike King cranks.
But, on the bright side, I was telling Josh that at least we are to the point where we are losing the winning fish instead of scratching out losing limits. We ended up catcing around 10 fish, nine of which came on Strike King cranks.
