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Follow my Fish of 2017
It's been a whirlwind the last few days, and I don't mean just the 25 MPH wind that's been churning. This year continues to be jam-packed with fishing for me and the guys and it makes me really appreciate the pros and the guides for doing this 300 days or more per year.
Of course, they are GOOD at this sport and that certainly helps them stay motivated. I guess I am on the other end of the spectrum, but it ALSO keeps me pretty motivated. While I am not guiding, nor really fishing any big-money tournaments, I AM fishing a lot and we've had a fair amount of success, despite tournament days being fairly rough.
I've been telling people that the best way to prepare for a big tournament is obviously more days on the water, but one of the more understated ways of gathering information is to fish wildcats or club tournaments on the same body of water in the weeks preceding your big tournament. So, the with second stop of the Alabama Bass Trail looming, we've been fishing the Ditto Wildcat on Thursday nights. You can read about our first tournament by clicking the link below.
So based upon our experiences the week before, we decided that we wouldn't fish history, although that's nearly impossible for a stretch of river that offers so few holes that hold fish consistently. Case in point was the area that had been so good to Josh in the weeks before that had shut down that week, but we still fished it for almost half of the 3.5 hour tournament to only produce one fish. It was basically agreed that we spend all last week up river of Ditto, so we would go down river this week.
We decided to fish hard and fish fast and not stop unless something really grabbed our attention. That took burning a lot of water, and I mean A LOT. We didn't get bit in the first two or three spots we fished.
We were throwing the typical mixture of Ditto-type baits: shakey heads, jigs, and cranks. But it was the PowerTeam Lures 4.8" Swinging Hammer swimbait that suddenly started catching fish. We were paralleling chunk rock when the Lowerance started marking bait and suspended fish. That's when we got bit. We'd catch three or four fish, all of them either 12 inch spots or 15 inch largemouth and many of them short fish that we had to throw back. Then we would go through a dead area. There wasn't anything that we could tell that separated the areas. No channel swings or changes in banks. Just bait.
It became obvious that the bait was key but we weren't catching the bigger arches that were suspended. We were catching the buck bass. We couldn't get the females to bite. We zoomed down around a mile of bank and culled a few times but simply could not find a big upgrade. In all, we caught around 15-20 fish on swimbaits and crankbaits but we left them biting due to the lack of quality. We also never fished the same stretch twice.
We returned to Ditto about 15 minutes before weigh in and began fishing docks. Obviously docks can be a factor. Josh has success and I have been with him when he's caught fish. But I can't. It isn't that I can't flip docks or anything, I just don't have the luck. Much of that is likely because I am on the back of the boat and the angle is all wrong.
So when Josh caught a solid upgrade while flipping a dock, I wasn't surprised, even though I was aimlessly casting my swimbait. That isn't to say I wasn't hitting specific spots or trying, because I was. I just had no faith that I would catch anything that mattered.
Boy, was I wrong.
I was throwing into the "T" section of one of the docks when the swimbait just stopped. Like I had hung one of the cables or a brush pile. I was throwing this on a Denali Lithium x-heavy rod with 50 pound braid and this fish just stopped me in my tracks.
I had a great hookset and Josh netted what we knew was a beast for a Ditto fish and I didn't really think about it when I put it in the box and tossed out the squeaker that was our fifth fish. Good fish. Maybe a money fish. Maybe five pounds.
So imagine my surprise when, five minutes later, the scales said 6.30.
With the four other little fish, we had enough for 3rd place, but I did get big fish which paid well enough for us to eat some Burger King. Heck of a fish! Sadly, still not enough information on Wheeler to convince me to stay up there. We will give it another try on Thursday!
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