Read about all of my Fishing Adventures!
Follow my Fish of 2017
The Thursday night wildcat was supposed to start up last week but it was canceled due to rain and I was at the beach, so it worked out well. Josh had been on some really good fish and I was super excited about getting started fishing Thursday nights again as well as preparing for the second stop of the Alabama Bass Trail.
After such a fast start to the year in fishing tournaments, things have cooled off dramatically. Really, though, only the Guntersville ABT was a bad tournament. The last two tournaments were on Wilson and we caught plenty of fish, just no BIG fish. Turned out that BIG fish were needed. You can read about our last tournament on Wilson by clicking the link below.
Ok, so Josh had been out while I was on vacation and had sacked up around 16 pounds pretty easy and he did it without any 5-plus fish. He went out again days later and struggled, but still caught fish where he had caught fish before. I went out Wednesday with my wife and dog, Nova, and I really couldn't catching anything other than a migraine. I should have looked at the weather and said "Nope."
Truth be told, with the high pressure, post frontal, and not a lick of current, we shouldn't have bothered. Anytime there are high skies and high pressure, I get a migraine and I don't know if its from just the weather or because the fishing.
So, I began to temper my expectations of fishing last night knowing that my and Josh's last trip hadn't been very good and the weather still wasn't conducive to good fishing, nor was the current looking very good. Really need at least 30K CFS to trigger a good bite.
But, at blast-off, we made our move to where Josh had been having success and on the first cast he boated a nice spot. We both thought "here we go." Last time he did that, he said it was every cast.
But it wasn't. In fact, we didn't get another bite. So, we moved into little river and began drifting down rip rap banks in front of Whitesburg and still couldn't get bit other than a catfish that I tail hooked with a Strike King 6XD. While fishing trash on the bottom with a jig, I did set the hook on a fish and fought it to the boat. It was a magnum spot and exactly the kind of fish we were looking for. But as soon as the net went into the water, it spit the jig out. My guess is that I never set the hook into the fish and it was just pissed off enough to fight me. Truth is, it hit under the boat, essentially, where I had dropshotted it after marking a group of fish on downscan. The fish had run in a way that I never really popped it. That was really disheartening because it was such a good quality fish. I am guessing 3.5 pounds.
We pulled up to Butler and doubled up on fish. Mine came on a jerkbait and didn't measure, but Josh's fish did. That put us at two and a long way from where we needed to be. We also noticed that there was no current in little river, which meant there was REALLY no current on the main river. I never verified with the TVA app, but I bet they put the breaks on. On the other hand, the water level was also dropping. Both were very, very bad for fishing.
We moved into Butler and Josh missed two 4-pound fish on essentially back to back casts. We saw both of the fish.
We didn't get another bite for the rest of the evening.
As we put the boat on the trailer a few minutes early, we saw that virtually every one else had already done so. Weigh in went about as expected. My friend Jeremy and his father won with a 14 pound limit that included a solid five point largemouth. Second and third were around 11 and 10 pounds and included smallmouth that I assume came from the dam, though Josh did catch one non-measuring smallie down river.
It doesn't take a math genius to see what missing 11 pounds of fish did to us. My wife made the comment that everyone misses giants and no one misses dinks. For the most part, she's right. But I don't exaggerate much and while I don't think we would have had 14 pounds, we would have had enough for second for sure.
After months of fishing super clean, we had that one tournament where bites were at an absolute premium and we didn't get it done. The good news is, there's always next week!
No comments:
Post a Comment