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SURPRISE! Another tough day on the water.
This is actually a report for the last two Thursday nights. The Ditto Wildcats started back up. Last week, Josh and I fished together. If you recall, the weather was supposed to be really nasty and at one point I had doubts we would be able to fish. Truth is, I have expected to get a text at any point Thursday afternoon telling us to push it off for a week. In addition to the bad weather, current was a major issue, as in....lack of current.
As if the winter and spring couldn't be weird enough, we had less than 10K CFS current in April, something I don't think I recall ever seeing. That's right. After literally months of over-120K CFS and weeks of completely unfishable water, now we have current fit for July. Pickwick was no different last week, as you can read about here.
Back to the weather. Most of our good spots are up around Guntersville dam, but there is no service. You may recall that Josh and I were caught in a super nasty lightening storm last year during the Classic that scared both of us real good and had we not had a Good Samaritan to help us, we may not have gotten back. My wife reminded me of this and not-so-subtle like told me not to run more than a mile or two from Ditto. With no current, Ditto would be crappy, but hey....let's go fishing.
.....and it was just as we expected. Bad. It still took a really good 15+ pound bag to win, but it was the lone boat that was brave enough to run up river. Inside Ditto Marina was almost every OTHER boat. We were struggling along with just two fish when we fished along side my buddy Matt and he told us to throw spinnerbaits. I didn't have one with me, but Josh did and we ended up with a limit. It was super small, but at least we had five. As an aside, that is why I LOVE fishing with these guys. We are all competitors, but we are also friends who just want to catch fish.
Josh was out this Thursday, but Wyatt was already out fishing during the day, so we teamed up to fish. TVA was pulling a fair amount of current (60,000 CFS) and the expectation was that the bite would be really good. Naaman had fished Wednesday night and it sounded like several of my spots up river had fish on them, even if the bite was a bit tough. Having learned my lesson last week, we made the run up to the dam.
We started in a spot I call The Nursery. We call it that because it always has fish, but typically nothing over two pounds. Now, I've had some really good days in there and I've caught a ton of fish, but nothing over three to four pounds. The area fishes super small and once we got to them, we started getting bit. I caught two or three. Wyatt caught one decent fish. Then he had a treble hook break at the boat that lost a really solid fish. We were getting bit, but it was a bunch of dinks.
I made a huge mistake at this point. The fact that we were getting bit this good at my first stop made me start thinking about getting better bites elsewhere. The line of thinking is, I don't want to sit on a pile of dinks while someone is sitting on a pile of bigs. With that, we left.
That was a major mistake. The wind was howling at a 20 MPH clip, making it impossible to throw anything but cranks. They were not biting. Around dark, we headed back to Ditto with just two fish. Like last week, there were six or seven boats inside Ditto. Still, I was able to find a decent stretch and finished out the limit that included one really nice 2.5 pound fish. I knew it wasn't enough so I dumped them all when I found out several boats had limits.
It took 12 pounds to win with a steep drop off. The bite was bad for everyone and there wasn't a BIG fish caught, so to speak.
Yes, the struggle continues. But, we at least caught a few fish. Shakey head was the only thing I could get bit on and while I think you can catch fish in Ditto, the ropes between the slips leaves precious few places to fish.
With Wyatt having fished all day Thursday without catching anything, with Naaman struggling to get bit Wednesday, and with the struggles across the field Thursday, here's what we know. The big ones are impossible to find right now. Pretty much everything weighed are females. The fish are in all different stages, which has spread them thin.
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