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Follow my Fish of 2018
So, there's a new Friday night wildcat for those of us that work for NASA. I've been wanting to fish it for awhile but life gets in the way, specifically those all day softball tournaments, which you can read about in my Confessions of a Travel Softball Coach. While we DID have a tournament that next morning, it was in Athens, which is a very short drive and we didn't have one of the early games. Josh and I teamed up to tame the upper end of Wheeler (sarcasm).
Now, if you read my last fishing post, you will know that we haven't tamed ANYTHING on that end of the river in months. After catching the water on fire over the first two months of the wildcats out of Ditto, our fishing hit rock bottom when the water temps got above 80 degrees. You can read about that by clicking this link.
Nevertheless, we had an all-new plan we wanted to try this past Friday. We were gonna run-and-gun and hit as many of our junk fishing spots as we could. The reasoning was that we never seemed to guess right on what three to five spots we would fish with the four hours or so we had to fish. This time, we were going to hit a post for no more than 15 minutes and if it didn't produce, we moved on.
We started out at the 431 bridge and I caught my first fish on the first cast of the day on a Pop-R. We added another short fish or two but it was obvious that the better fish weren't there.
Moving on, we hit a stretch of rip-rap above the bridge without so much as a sniff. We moved to the other side of the river and things went crazy.
Throwing a mixture of top-waters and cranks, we had three doubles and caught several more fish. In the span of five casts each, we had boated a limit and were culling. Then the spot went quiet, although there were still fish in the area chasing bait.
Moving on.
Next spot was a deeper area with a rockpile in current. We had been catching a lot of fish every time we had fished there, but never good fish. In three casts, Josh caught a nice smallie and a spot. I added a third cull.
We didn't catch another fish the rest of the evening although we spent the majority of the evening at the upper point of Hobb's Island looking for a five-plus fish.
Still, the 9.2 pound sack with a 2.4 pound smallie was enough for the win. Dock talk was interesting because some boats couldn't get bit at all while others could only get quality bites, just not enough to make a limit. Others said they caught 30 fish or more. We caught around 20 on the day and probably could have caught more had we stayed in some of the spots where we had been catching numbers.
Surprisingly, plastics and bottom baits didn't catch but maybe three fish all evening and even two of those was me swimming a worm in 20 feet. The majority of the damage was done on top waters.
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