Read about all of my Fishing Adventures!
Follow my Fish of 2018
If you keep up with me on Facebook, you already know what's up. If you don't, well, click that link, follow me, and then read on.
I hope you guys that read this, and there are a lot of you, understand why I write these reports and you know that I don't think of myself as very good at this sport. If you don't know this, let me enlighten you.
First, I love writing. Plain and simple. It's something that I actually like AND I think I am pretty good at doing. Why do I write? Well, because the sport of bass fishing is full of guides telling you how awesome the fishing is right now, how this or that bait and technique catches all the fish, and how everyone is catching giant fish.
The truth is, and you guys know this, fishing isn't easy. Tournament fishing, especially on a bigger stage, SURE ain't easy. Reading from someone that puts those struggles out there in the public eye puts things in perspective, at least I think so. I'd love to hear what you guys think.
Due to time constraints, I was limited to one day a few weeks ago and Friday before the tournament. Josh had gone out two other times, but had failed to find anything of note. I had high hopes that the ledge fish that Brad and I had found back in July, which you can read about by clicking the link below. We finished second in our club tournament.
With the continued heat, I had hope that we would find ledge fish once again, but all evidence was to the contrary. Friday, we put in at Brush creek and ran down river. The thought was that we wanted to be away from other boats and we were willing to make the run to be alone and not fight over fish.
We found some ditches and drains and marked fish on them, right where they needed to be. Five minutes later, we had caught two fish. We marked several other promising ledges, but couldn't really catch fish. That Friday, the current wasn't great, but it was around 25-30,000 CFS pretty much all day, and was kicked up around 50-60,000 later in the day, which turned on some schooling fish. The issue was, we didn't catch any measuring fish on Friday, but at least we were catching multiple fish in spots instead of junk fishing around for one here and there.
We were boat 60 and we ran all the way to this spot, which was past Waterloo. This did include two stops of grasslines which produced one measuring fish and several non-committal blow ups on top water.
When the sun got over the trees, we made it to our ledge spot, but remarked that there were at least 25-30 boats centered around three different spots around Koger island.
The current was awful, starting out between 15-20,000 all morning and while it did get a bump around midday, it was a modest bump. The water temp was 84 and made its way to 85 by the end of the day.
We didn't catch any more measuring fish for the rest of the day and at noon had abandoned our game plan. The fish were still on the ledges but they weren't grouped up and they couldn't be made to bite. We fished hard as we could and hit everything we knew to try. Nothing seemed to work.
We had the first weigh in slot, so we just put in on the trailer and left, but as we headed home, we noticed how pitiful the first flight weights were. Eventually, the weights for the later flights went way up and it ended up taking a good bag to win.
Here's the long and short of it: we out-thought ourselves. Running from everyone is great, provided that you eventually get current. That means waiting all day for that current. In this case, since we had the earliest weigh in time, it wouldn't have mattered if we had been there the second the current hit our ledge, we wouldn't have had enough time to fish. That's partly on us, but also a testament to how you can't control things such as TVA and your blast off/weigh in times.
The reason so many boats were clustered on similar ledges wasn't because they were that much better. It's because the current would actually get to them with enough time for the fishermen to catch the fish. We know from friends of ours that recorded a top-10 finish that they caught their fish about the time we pulled our of McFarland.
We also noted how we were fishing the "obvious" ledge stuff while a lot of people were fishing a lot less "obvious." The same friends showed us just how subtle the difference between 10-12 pounds and 16-18 pounds can be.
In the end, you need to have a ton of spots and you need to start up river and make your way down river, based upon the current and the bite.
Anyways, here is a link to the year review.
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