Read about all of my Fishing Adventures!
As all of you are probably well aware, the Alabama weather is doing what the Alabama weather seems to do each year. Lots of rain followed by some brutal cold for a day or so and then when you finally get good weather, it's on a Wednesday and you can't go fishing.
The current and water color seems to run a lot of people away at the thought of fishing, especially the upper end of Wheeler. Can't say I blame them, sometimes. If you don't have the experience and equipment, it can be down-right frustrating. The last three trips have been like that, even for people who fish Wheeler a lot.
Last Sunday, I took my daughter out for a few hours. It was windy but the sun was shining a bit, which is really the key ingredient to getting on a good bite. I had a couple of places that have been solid over the last month. Nothing special to them, just wood along the shoreline where current is pushing and we could get consistently bit on a spinnerbait. We caught a few but we had to cover hundreds of yards to get bit. This doesn't produce any big fish, but it can be fairly mindless and you can forget about fighting the current or working a bait really hard.
We tried a few other current breaks where the fish get stacked up, but couldn't get bit. Eventually, we headed up river to fish the mouths of some major creeks and did find one that was holding fish. Unfortunately, we had some crappie fishermen that were sitting right on top of the bass, so we were forced to fish the edges of the school. It produced some fish, but it was fairly tough.
This past weekend, I was able to get out for a short afternoon trip and found much of the same conditions. After fishing several high probability spots without a bite, we begun running the mouths of these creeks again. Eventually, we found a school.
After not getting a single bite, I was able to connect on five straight casts that resulted in some magnum spots and the largemouth pictured above. Working a bait in that kind of current, especially when they want it sitting right on the bottom and at the end of really long casts can be frustrating. Each cast would take several minutes and the fish would bite the bait several times before finally committing. But, if we worked it all the way to the boat, they would eat it, some of them directly under the boat.
We caught around 20 fish, but they were very very picky on the baits we threw and it was very obvious that while they would eat a crank or a jig, they really wanted a swimbait. We had around 16 pounds in our best five fairly quick and continued to catch them consistently for about 30 minutes before we tried to find some smallies.
Unfortunately, we never caught another fish off of the one spot and once we idled back to it, we couldn't get the fish to fire back up. Still, it was hard to be upset with the numbers and quality. There were several four pound spots in the mix along with that big largemouth.
On our way back down river, we stopped at a very small creek and while I haven't caught them good on that spot in a month, it is one of the few spots that largemouth frequent in the current. After throwing a swimbait and losing about the tenth of the day, I decided that I was done with that bait and picked up a jig.
Again, I had to work this thing dead slow but a fish absolutely slammed it on my first cast. It didn't fight like a spot and I didn't think there were any largemouth that big on this point. So, when the fish rolled to the surface and wasn't a drum, as I expected, I tried to boat flip it.
The problem with that was, it was a five pounder on a 7-foot medium rod and it wasn't going to happen. I ended up lipping aboard a beautiful largemouth that was covered in spots. I really wish I would have taken pictures of it. Our best five were a little over 20 pounds with the two five pound largemouths anchoring it and three big spots.
This will likely be my last winter report for Wheeler as the ABT is on the horizon.
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