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Follow my Fish of 2017
Sorry it has taken me over a week to get this together, but I've been out of town. Truth is, I needed a week off of fishing. Following the ABT on Guntersville, I was hoping to get on Wilson for two straight weeks and make some hay. The first trip wasn't great. We had caught around 14 pounds in practice, but we had done that without catching a single big fish, now had we fished the dam.
Then, on tournament day, a dead trolling motor kept us from fishing the dam at all, which was an integral part of our plan. Still, we managed 14 pounds but 3rd place didn't pay because we didn't have enough boats. You can read the whole report below.
Fishing Report for Wilson 3/17/18
Back on Wilson the very next week and I thought it should be a fairly easy tournament for us. My plan had been to hit my down river spots and get a good limit of around 14 pounds, then go for the big ones. However, a call was made by our tournament director to move to Safety Harbor due to wind in the forecast. Honestly, I didn't think the wind was going to be a big deal, but it was his call. It hurt our game plan a good bit because it basically forced us to fish the dam first.
So, we did that and didn't get a bite for two hours. We knew that the dam MAY be a factor late, but we needed to get a limit.
We ran down river to the north bank, but the south wind made it hard to really fish thoroughly and I found out pretty quick that the fish didn't want moving baits. That wasn't a surprise, other than the occasional jerk bait bite the week before, we had caught everything on shakey heads and jigs, anyway.
Continuing to try and fish points on the north bank, the wind pushed us into the creeks. However, we started getting bit on the jig. It was slow at first until we really zoned in what stretches they liked. Then we started loading the boat. For the rest of the day, we fished the first 50 yards of the creeks and caught fish after fish. The issue was that they were all two pound largemouth. We culled time after time, but it was by half or quarter ounces.
We had to make a choice at this point: Do we hope to run into big one or do we scrap catching these fish all together and find something new? We decided that we would keep catching numbers until there was about an hour left. As predicted, the numbers remained and we simply could not get bigger fish to bite.
With an hour left and after talking to some guys who said the dam wasn't producing, we decided to do what I felt comfortable with: cranking bluffs.
This technique is a tough one to gauge because several things can happen. You can not get bit for whole stretches, forcing you to cover water. Even then, you might find one every 100 yards or you might find a pile. You have to know when to cut bait and give up, when to hammer down on the trolling motor, or when to break out the jig. An hour isn't enough to do anything other than luck into a 5-pounder. But we both felt like one would get us in the money and two might win. We had around 10 or 11 pounds at the time.
So, we put the Minn Kota on high and I broke out my AKRods cranking stick and a deep diving crank. First stretch, nothing. That's not a surprise.
Second stretch, rod loaded up. Boat swang a nice upgrade of around a pound. Dropped it in the livewell, next cast, BOOM. Another pound upgrade.
And we were out of time.
I really felt like an extra hour would have given us the chance to really do something, but weigh-in had been voted for 2PM with a 630 start, which I wasn't a fan of, but that's the way it goes.
We ended up at third place with second taking a similar bag but featured a six pound smallie that boosted the weight to 18. The winning sack was 22 pounds. I couldn't tell you where and how that happened, although I can say that those two bags had smallies and we had none, leading me to believe that the fish were biting at the dam, we just didn't wait them out.
In the end, we caught a TON of keepers, just never ran into any big fish. Our bag didn't have a fish bigger than three pounds. We caught 75% on a jig with our nicer fish on a jerkbait and the next two on a crank.
Back at it this Thursday!
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