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Follow my Fish of 2019
Got a lot to unpack from this weekend and I will try and make it not turn into a novel. As many of you know, mid-November and December have been FANTASTIC to me over the last year. It's not that previous years haven't been good, I just haven't fished as much in the winter. But once I started figuring some stuff out, it has made for must-fish days. You can read about some of those by clicking the link below.
Ok, so let's get right to it. We've had some decent days this winter, won some small tournaments, caught a lot of fish, but we haven't had big bags like we had last year. On my birthday, I got out by myself and, wouldn't you know it, the big ones were biting. I racked up around 21 pounds of smallies, largemouth, and spots while catching around 20 total fish. You can read about that by clicking the link below.
But over the last two weeks, I've been practicing for the Dry Creek Marina tournament. I wanted to prove to myself that we could do more than win smaller events and occasionally get a check in the Alabama Bass Trail. With three kids and a job, "practicing" became an hour here and there but never enough time to really nail down the finer points of where, when, and how of catching fish. I'd usually have time to fish three spots and decide if they were there and what they would eat.
Thursday, I fished Aldridge Creek and the mouth of Ditto, two areas that I consistently catch fish when there is current, and on Thursday, there was over 100,000 CFS. I didn't get bit on either of these spots, nor could I get bit on any of the individual rock piles that have been holding big smallmouth. I also fished a couple of new areas that I hadn't fished, but had some of the same features, but nothing seemed to be home. I ended Thursday catching one measuring fish, but I wasn't terribly concerned. The river was blown out and muddy. Plus, I knew that it might take a day or so for the fish to settle down after the flooding and extreme current.
Friday left me with cause for concern. I went back to those two spots and caught fish. They did seem to bite whatever I threw, whether that was a Stike King 6XD, a swimbait or a jig, but they were all small. Now, I am glad I didn't catch any monsters, but I didn't expect monsters to be at those two places.
Aldridge and Ditto are mere litmus tests for the rest of the upper end of the river. If they are there and they have decent size, then I know exactly what I need to do elsewhere to catch the big ones. So, when I went to my other areas expecting to catch decent fish, I was disappointed to find that I simply could not get bit. Leaving Friday afternoon, I wasn't really sure what to do. I knew we could get a limit of spotted bass from around Ditto, but it's a long way to ride from Decatur just to catch a limit of spots, and even if big spots showed up, we knew there was no way to exceed 15 pounds.
So, you can imagine my level of concern when we pulled up to Ditto and had exactly two bites that resulted in me dumping a two pound spot at the boat and nothing else. We wondered if we needed to let the sun come up, as it hadn't cleared the trees quite yet, but that meant fishing another hour or so in a critical part of the day. We knew one thing: the current had stabilized to around 80,000 CFS and there would be high skies, meaning that the off-shore bite should be phenomenal.
Instead of waiting, we decided to make a move to the off-shore areas earlier than we normally would. Just like summertime on Guntersville, all we've done is scanned the main river channel for abnormalities in the form of rockpiles and current breaks. Of course, there are a LOT of those, which is why it is imperative to get out and fish leading up to your tournament to know which ones have fish and which do not.
Settling into the first off shore spot, Josh caught our first limit while I alternated baits. It became fairly obvious that either I wasn't throwing the right bait or the angle I had from the back of the boat was such that I wasn't going to get bit. So, I decided to throw the same thing he did. As I slow rolled a swimbait, I eased it over a rockpile, letting current take it. The hit felt like a smaller fish and even when I set the hook, it didn't feel like the fish had any weight to it. I told Josh not to bother with the net, but that became a mistake when I realized that the 5.25 smallmouth was running right at me. I reeled down and added a second hookset to make sure the fish was buttoned up and we netted her. That fish, plus a series of consistent culls by decent spots put us around 12 pounds by 8AM.
Following that flurry of about 10 keepers, the bite died and we made our way to one of my big smallie spots. Typically, the big one will bite within five minutes, so fifteen minutes later when we hadn't been bit, we knew it was time to move on.
We stopped on a bluff that I had randomly stopped at a few weeks ago and caught largemouth on before going back on the 24th and catching a five pound smallie. Obviously, there is something there that the fish want. They weren't EXACTLY on the same spot, but Josh boat flipped a three pound largemouth that helped the cause and brought us up to around 14 pounds. It was the only fish we caught on that stretch so we continued to move up river and stopped at the mouth of a creek.
This creek is always hot or cold and it is that way year-round. It will either blank you or load the boat with nothing in between. I had caught a decent number of fish on the 24th on this spot, but none that would help. For the first ten minutes, it didn't seem like it was going to produce, but Josh made a slight boat position change that allowed the current to keep the bait in the strike zone longer. This paid off as we culled another couple of times, but we were spending more time on the cull beam than we were fishing. Still, we upped the sack to around 17 pounds, but three of the fish were all 2.5 pound clone spots and we hadn't caught but the one single largemouth and smallmouth, giving us serious doubts that we were going to cull up again, at least at that spot.
Now, Friday night and on the drive to the lake Saturday morning, I had said that 17 pounds would put us in the mix to be competitive. Knowing how the bite had toughened over the last few days, I figured someone would hit 20 pounds but the weights would plummet after that. My thought was that we should start rotating the big smallie holes I knew of and avoid areas that we knew held spots. That essentially meant there were three spots left that I had, one at the dam, one back around Ditto, and one in Decatur.
Josh had a different plan and it is one of the best audibles, if not the best audible, that I have personally witnessed.
This will seem like an aside, but just follow me. There are about three boats in the Thursday night wildcat crew that consistently win. Two of these, in particular, fish some areas that look completely and utterly random. Over the last few months, Josh and I have scanned all of these areas but we've never really fished them, nor have we seen fish on them. However, Josh noted that there was a SIMILAR area very close to us, so we motored over to it.
In the middle of his first cast, he made a comment that "if there are big smallies biting, we will catch them here." Before he got "here" out of his mouth, he set the hook on a fish, but we didn't think it was a smallie. It looked like a huge fish as it loaded the rod, but the bottom composition didn't look like anything a smallie would be on. For the most part, it was completely flat, but when the fish boiled yards from the boat, we knew we were in business. We boated a five pounder. Fist bumps all around.
Within five minutes, I had caught two more in the same ball park. We now had five brownies, only one of which was under four pounds and two of them were legit studs. It was only noon.
We spend the rest of the afternoon just fun fishing, recycling areas and catching more and more fish. By 2PM, the size of the spots had gone up even more and we were throwing back three pounders consistently. Turned out, I was wrong on those spots. There was enough big ones to have been competitive on the spots alone.
We weighed in 21.5 pounds and took home the win.
