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Just when things were looking up and we were continuing a push to make the ABT Championship, we threw out a clunker that likely torpedoed our chances. That being said, this wasn't one of those times where we didn't find or catch fish. I can't even say that I am upset with the finish. If you missed the report for Weiss, click the link below.
Now, I am a little upset with the weight we caught compared to everyone else. If you look at the weights, you will see that we finished something like 130th with a little over ten pounds while it seemed like 15 pounds was the benchmark for everyone. One of the reasons I like writing about fishing is to give the story within the story. In this case, it would be easy to make some assumptions based on where we finished and what everyone else did. For example, you could say that based upon our finish and our weight that we were way out of our class and don't know what we were doing.
I made the comment during weigh on on camera that I caught every 14.5 incher on the lake. Yeah, it was a stretch, but boy did we seem to wack on those little guys.
I made the comment during weigh on on camera that I caught every 14.5 incher on the lake. Yeah, it was a stretch, but boy did we seem to wack on those little guys.
One of the though parts about being our age with our families and the things they do is coming to grips with this: no matter how good you are, no matter how hard you work, you can't replace experience or time on the water. For Josh and I, that means trying to overcome one and a half days of prefishing with a combination of talent and luck. It's worked for us some times but it won't work the majority of the time. This tournament was one of the latter.
Josh got a day to prefish a week before the tournament. He caught some fish, but didn't get a pattern.
A month ago, we experimented with some new offshore humps and while we did catch fish, they were small. We speculated that fish may move out on the humps on the main river, but we simply didn't have time to check, so we stuck it in our back pocket. Ultimately, we never fished them though we hope to make it part of the rotation going forward. We caught fish on all of these humps, most of them coming from 18 feet up to 14 feet and we caught fish on Strike King 6XDs and jigs.
Friday, we spent over half the day idling around offshore looking for schools of fish. We did this for several reasons, but the most important being we feel like we have at least some edge on others when we fish offshore. A lot of people avoid it at all costs. Also, we've learned that if you wait for guides and others to tell you the deep bite is on, it's too late to win any big tournaments.
Alas, we never found any schools, though one spot I found last year had a boat on top of it every time we looked. Eventually, the afternoon moved in and the spot opened up. We idled it and it had a decent little school. Here's where I made the first mistake. Because weather was moving in and I didn't want to get caught in it, I told Josh that I didn't want to fish it and see what size fish were on it. I based this on the fact that the same spot held 3 and 4 pounders last year.
Though we caught fish here and there, mostly we found two fish on every hump. These humps had scattered grass on top and if you could target these small clumps, you could get bit. None of the fish were big, but it was consistent.
Saturday morning, we were boat 21. We decided to forgo the dam and run to the school we found Friday. Next mistake was this: we had assumed that we would have to fight people all day to get on a school and that the shallow bite wouldn't be a factor and by midday, everyone would be offshore. We were the first boat on it and though we did have two boats come idle around us, no one stopped to fish.
The day started out perfectly as we located the fish and began catching them. We had three measuring fish very quickly and were getting bit pretty much every cast. The issue was, everything was 14.5 inches long. The three we did have were barely keepers. But, you never leave biting fish, which we had JUST been bitten by last week on Wheeler when we did just that. So we caught and caught and caught. While there were some lulls, the bite was consistent. The size never improved. We caught them on everything we threw.
We should have thought about a few things. First, we've had the most success on Coosa River, mainly because we've learned that fish school in similar sizes. After about the 5th fish of the same size, we should have left. Second, the fact that they were biting everything we threw should have told us it was less about the spot and more about the fish being active.
But we doggedly stuck to the spot for 6 hours and before we knew it, it was noon and we had just three measuring fish. We began junk fishing some history, which we had agreed to do for just an hour and just to get a limit. First spot we fished, I caught a measuring smallmouth and another short largemouth. We had several other bites. Next spot, more short fish.
It was about this time we learned that the fish were biting, and they were biting everywhere. We had limited ourselves to only fishing for small fish. But we had plenty of time to fix that. We went super shallow to throw spinnerbaits on wood. Wouldn't you know it, we caught our best fish and started getting bit by better quality. The bad news was, we ran out of time.
Coulda woulda shoulda, but we took ourselves out of the game by going deep and while the winners and several other big bags came from deep, we had limited ourselves to a school of small fish. Word was, the better schools were even further downriver than we were in Brush Creek. However, the situation we find ourselves in make it virtually impossible to fish that area because it is just so far from our homes, That's six hours of drive time alone. But, we at least acknowledge that we have made that decision and if we want to get better, we have to figure that out.
For everyone else, a lot of them just went fishing, beating the banks and whatnot and they had great days. Our buddies had over 15 pounds and didn't even cash a check. In other words, we could have gone fishing without any practice and would have been better off.
Then again, we caught around 30 fish and had a ton of fun, so I ain't even mad. I am slightly miffed that we didn't figure out some things earlier, specifically about the school fish, which raises a lot of questions. Do these fish always run in schools of the same size? Do the schools move over the year? Do they rotate each year? Did those other boats catch all the big ones from that one school? So many questions. So little time.
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