Fishing Report for Guntersville 10/31/18

Follow me on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter!

Read about all of my Fishing Adventures!

Follow my Fish of 2018

Happy belated Halloween, yall! For us .Gov saps, it was "Safety Stand Down Day." That is, "come to work but don't work." 

Pass.

So, let's go fishing. But where? I've beaten Wheeler up pretty good and it hasn't been great. Still, when we've dropped the hammer with the intentions of catching fish rather than going on a "learning trip", we've brought in between 10-13 pounds. 

Brad had been to Wilson and it had sucked. It's about time to start hammering on Pickwick, but reports have been abysmal. Same with Guntersville. 

Now, if you are up on current events on The Big G, you know what's been up. Spro held their annual frog only tournament last Saturday and the results were.....not so good. The winning sack was 18 pounds. Ok, that's not so bad. What WAS bad was the rest of the results. Let's put it this way: only 68 boats weighed in a single fish and it took a scant one fish for 2.21 to cash a $100 check.

Still, it wasn't a surprise the frog bite was bad. There's no grass. There's been a ton of instability in the weather. 

But we've had three straight days of very, very good weather. It was supposed to be sunny with a high of 80 and my belief was that fishing was going to be good anywhere we went, so it boiled down to Guntersville or Pickwick. We decided on the G because of the chances to catch some big fish. Also, we felt like we could nail down a pattern a lot faster than Pickwick. While I love Pickwick for its versatility, the drawback to that is that it can take DAYS to figure out the fish. 

So, we headed to Waterfront. There weren't a TON of trailers there, just the ones who don't believe in parking in the parking spots. I will never understand that ramp. People park on the sides of the parking lot, in the grass, and refuse to use the parking lot itself. We didn't realize the Costa event is on Guntersville this weekend, so when we were asked if we were fishing it, we were kinda surprised, but then it all made sense, considering the different states we saw represented. 

I guess we would have known about this tournament, if we had read the article on FLW's website that featured local guides Alex Davis and Ryan Salzman. You can read that article here. 

So, let me be upfront and say the following: these dudes are pros. They are local guides. They know a lot more than me. Then I read their quotes. I won't go into all of it, suffice to say that I've never been more convinced that these guys are steering people 180-degrees in the wrong direction. I don't think a the frog will be a factor, much less the winning bait, nor do I believe the claim that the A-rig will be the top bait for the Top-10 teams. I don't believe the miracle mile will be the magic stretch. I don't believe it will take 18 pounds a day, though what the winner brings in and what the rest of the field weighs is seldom in the same ball park in these conditions, but I digress. 

But let's get into what I DO know. 

Brad had been on the G several times in the past month and had found a few good patterns and spots. These spots had led to some check-cashing tournaments and days where he and his partners had caught between 30-60 fish a day. The last trip, they lost a six pounder early in the day on top water, so that's where we started.

It didn't take long to get on the board as we boated a couple of schoolers, but her noticed real quick that the fish weren't schooling good and there didn't seem to be a lot of bait surfacing. We believed a lot of this was because of the pervasive cloud cover, which we just KNEW would cook off and bring out the sun. Once the sun came out and the fish quit roaming and settled, we would start looking around.

But, the top water died and the sun didn't come out. So, we started scanning. We couldn't find anything that looked really promising and even the spots that looked OK didn't yield anything. Feeling kind of lost, we went to a spot where we caught two seven-pounders last year on back to back days. You can read about that here. This spot is really out of the way and non-descript. It's just another one of those shell bed encrusted ditches, of which there are thousands of on the lake. Except we know where it is and we rarely see anyone else there. 

So, we went to work using some soft plastics and really working the shell beds hard. Brad got on the board pretty quick with a five. 30 minutes later, I backed that up with a three. Another 30 minutes later, I up'd the total with a four. We already had a couple of fish on the board from our top water stop, so we estimated we had around 15 pounds. 

The sun never came out and the bite trickled to nothing. We only caught a few more fish the rest of the day, but they were small and there were a lot of bites we didn't hook up with. We recycled the top water spot and then the shell bed, but they never reloaded, not to mention that when we returned, there were four boats magically in the vicinity. The weather was turning even worse with a wind coming in at 20MPH and a serious chop on the water. We called it a day pretty quick.  

So, with that said, it's tough for me to put my foot down and refute what these pros said in the article. After all, I spend very little time on that lake, though Brad has had a solid year on the G and I've got a nine-pounder under my belt from earlier this year, which you can read about here. What we do know is that there isn't grass to speak of and what little there is, isn't "cheesy" and you can rest assured that it has been beat to death over the last seven days. We saw a fair amount of A-rigs flying and of course there was at least one boat on every causeway hurling it. 

What did work was getting out of the shallow water. If that spot of ours was on, we know of at least one or two more down river, but we didn't want to use to the gas to ride down there. So, stay out of the five-foot range. Slow down. Find hard bottom. With the weather moving in today and post-frontal this weekend, you are going to have to concentrate on the deeper bite, I believe.