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Follow my Fish of 2018
Kinda in a hurry today, being the first day of summer and all. Just so happens that everyone is already celebrating the holiday week, but I actually had work to do today. Well, I mean, I have time to write this, hence me telling you it will be short. Kinda like the bite we got on last night (spoiler alert).
Fishing is such an interesting and weird sport. You can fish and fish and fish and spend weeks trying to scrounge up a limit. I mean, it's crazy the think that we've caught tiny limits. We've caught a 6.3 without finishing a limit, but we have yet to put together a good bag.
The last few years, I've begun to wonder if we outsmart ourselves. This is a 3.5 hour tournament and you can't make bad decisions and you can't miss fish. It seemed like when we went to the dam, the winning bag was from down river. When we went down river, the bag was caught at the dam. Believe me when I say that the decision on where to go was talked about for an hour before blastoff, so it isn't like we just blindly chose.
TVA was pulling 45,000 CFS out of Guntersville. They had been steady all day, and they had the flood gates open, so there's actually a good bit more current than that. This time of year and on into deep summer, TYPICALLY current of this nature positions the fish really well and you can't just junk fish the way you normally would this time of year. So, we chose to run all the way up river to the dam.
Well, not quite. There are a couple of creeks that feed into the river within two miles of the dam. Try as we might, we've never caught a whole limit off these points. It's not that the fish are there, but my opinion is that when current has been steady, they've already fed up and are just chilling until the next feeding. Typically, that isn't in the window we fish. Now, we still usually get a solid bite on each of these so we just hoped we could piece together a bag.
I began throwing a Xcaliber zell pop while making the comment that I had YET to catch a top water fish this year. On the first cast, that remained true, though a fish exploded on the popping bait just a few twitches. The resulting wind knot I had was impressive as braid was wrapped all over the rod. The five or so minutes I spent untangling this mess was just enough as the same fish destroyed the bait seconds after it hit the water. We had a nice two pounder in the box.
Typically, I would have suggested that we only give that spot five minutes as we never catch more than one good fish. But Josh set the hook on another two pounder on a big worm seconds later. I took over the trolling motor and caught two on back-to-back casts on a big worm. After putting his fish in the box, Josh boated our biggest of the night, a 3.00 spot.
Then the bite died.
That doesn't mean we didn't get bit. Actually, we culled up three more times but bites on that spot dried up. Literally five straight casts or so to start, then nothing. In fact, it was more because we caught fish that didn't help in between some of those bigger ones.
By 7PM, we were moving around at the dam, looking for a big bite, but never found it.
At weigh in, we had 9.90, which was good enough for the win. This time of year, 10 pounds is going to get you a check in virtually every tournament from now until August. We were fortunate enough to get that bite.
Oh, and enjoy the laugh of my SECOND top water fish of the year.
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