Read about all of my Fishing Adventures!
Follow my Fish of 2018
Thanks to Flex Fridays and being generally lazy, we've spent a lot of time on Wheeler the last few weeks/months. Yeah yeah, I know that the upper end of Wheeler isn't known for great fishing. I keep hearing that. And, I know all about how it can be stupid tough in the dog days of summer.
But it also shines on occasion. Winter and spring are usually really good for numbers, although it's tough to find big fish, which is why we primarily spend the majority of our winter days on Pickwick.
However, the last month or so, we've been catching great numbers with some decent fish mixed in. You can read about some of those trips by clicking the links below. But, to sum up, the pattern has changed every day with the exception that they were biting better after lunch. Over the last three trips, we've caught around 20-30 each day with the best five typically only getting in the 10-12 pound range with no true big fish, just a lot of quality spots, mostly. Truth be told, I have the link to one of those days below, but the best of my days, I didn't even get to write a report for.
The opportunity came up to fish a company wildcat out of Ingall's Harbor this past Saturday and I've been DYING to fish a tournament, but I almost shied away from this one because Ingall's is.....not so good, at least for me. Now, we were in Josh's boat and if he didn't want to run to the First Creek area or up river to the dam, I understood. I figured we could at least find something around Decatur, if we had to.
We had Friday off, but Josh couldn't fish. So, I asked Brad to go with me. I wanted to check some of the patterns I had found. Brad has only been to Ditto around three times and we've done terrible every time. I was sure we could get on something. After all, it was only four days removed from me putting a solid 13 pound bag together and I had left them biting.
Wouldn't you know it, we didn't get a single bite. Not one. There are a couple of things to consider. First, current was in the 130K CFS range and that's ROLLING. There was a ton of stain in the water and the obscene amount of rain fall had pushed the lake above full pool AND dropped water temps down about four degrees. So, Brad swore off Ditto forever and I was left scratching my head.
Saturday morning I drove into Decatur. Got to Hardees to find out Josh was late, so I enjoyed coffee in the heat while the other boats enjoyed frigid temps. Josh and I got on the water about 7, but fog had descended and though we had decided to head up river, we weren't going ANYWHERE in that.
So, we graphed a little. We dropped the trolling motor. We had a limit including a four pound smallie within minutes. Now, Josh caught the big girl while I boated the squeakers, but it was a limit. It also gave us a lot of pause because, if we could drop the trolling motor and catch them, so could everyone else. And, what if we started catching them really good here? Should we stay?
Josh had a plan. That plan was that today we were going to see how long it took and how many gallons of gas we would need to make it to the dam and back. I didn't really realize that at the time, but it was a great day to do that. So, after the fog lifted, we began the trek upstream. We stopped at a few current breaks along the way, but didn't catch anything.
We stopped at one particular creek just up from Decatur, just to see what we could see. And it got real, real quick.
Josh boats a three pounder. I boated a keeper that culled. Then he caught one. Then I caught one. And next thing you knew, we had culled all but the one big fish. The craziest part was, suddenly that big fish wasn't so big anymore. In all, we caught around 10 or so fish within just a few minutes. The trick? The fish were sitting on the drop, just waiting. We would bounce our baits off the rocks and stumps and as soon as the bait cleared the break line, the lines would load up.
After a few minutes, it became clear that there were a TON of quality fish, but we weren't catching BIG ones. Now, at this point, BIG was three pounds or better. I put down my Strike King 3 and picked up a single swimbait. I made the remark that I knew a good fish was in the area. It wasn't a question of timing or if the fish was there, but what she wanted. I caught one or two on the swimbait and then had the rod load up.
This was the one. This was the five-plus. This was GAME OVER at 9AM.
The line went slack. I had broke her off. But how? That was 17-pound Segaur. When I pulled in the inline, a straightened out D-ring clasp was all that was left. Wow. I'm not POSITIVE it was a bass because I never saw it. But, all we had caught were bass, so I have no reason to believe it was anything else.
We continued up river, but we only culled one more time. The fishing did slow somewhat, but it was more a factor of having 15 pounds and we would need a five pounder to cull up any of the fish we had.
After weigh in, I was asked about going to the dam. Mostly just why we would do that for the little bit of money. People just assumed we caught them there, or any of the handful of spots above the 431 bridge. Truth be told, we didn't catch but about five fish and only one helped. We didn't fish ANY of the stuff we had planned to fish. It hadn't mattered. We accomplished the goal of finding how much time and gas it took to get there and back. Answer: 51 minutes at a nice cruise speed and 31 gallons of gas.
We caught everything on a Strike King Series 3 and swimbaits. Water temp was 52 degrees. Less than three inches of visibility.
We ended up with a win with over 15 pounds. We missed out on big fish by 0.01 pound.
I will be hosting a Black Friday tournament out of Ditto from 6-2PM. Let me know if you would like any information.
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