Read about all of my Fishing Adventures!
When we signed up to fish our last tournament on Wheeler, we had some concern that we were misusing our time. The first event for the Alabama Bass Trail was on Guntersville and neither Josh and I had fished the Big G in in months and months. Some of that is because the winter on Wheeler can be special and some of it is because I just don't like Guntersville. Here are a couple of those stories:
The thought was, we were on fish on Wheeler and we were consistently cashing checks each and every tournament, which is a far cry from what we expected on Guntersville. Truly, it wasn't just that we struggle on Guntersville this time of year, we also struck out on Smith for the first tournament of the year last year with the ABT as well. You can click on the links below and read those sad stories.
Fishing Report for Smith Lake 2/16/19
In the ABT, you can have bad tournaments, but you cannot afford to strike out in the first one of the year if you hope to fish in the ABT Championship. That's exactly what we had done both the last two years and we came up short last season simply because we didn't weight a fish in the first tournament of the year. Literally, a limit of fish on Smith would have put us in the Championship.
Enough about the past. Let's talk about this tournament and the practices leading up to it.
As all of you know, the weather has been beyond pitiful for fishing so far. I am willing to fish bad weather. Cold weather. Wind. Whatever. But one thing you can't fish is flooding conditions that keep you from getting the boat in the water. With that said, we fished the few days that we could.
The first trip was Martin Luther King Day. It was 15 degrees and windy when we put in at Alred's and we moved into Brown's Creek. Hours and hours of fishing yielded two bites and one fish, a barely legal keeper caught on a chatterbait. Josh added a second trip on a decent Sunday afternoon where he found some deeper fish on points on the upper end of the river as well as some fish that were pulled up in flooded brush and trees. Of course, the latter wasn't a stable pattern with the water levels constantly fluctuating.
On President's day , Josh found that the deeper fish were still in the same place and he had a consistent day, but there were no size among the fish. Still, it was consistent and it was better than anything else we had found.
Just to recap, thus far: In two trips, I had caught two fish. Josh had fished two more trips and had at least caught a limit each trip, but nothing to get excited about.
From here, the discussion wasn't about winning or even cashing a check, but how to get five fish to keep us in the middle of the standings. Based on the prefishing, we decided that the week of the event, we would focus on Roseberry creek, only. Not that there seemed to be anything magical about it, but that we simply hadn't had any luck outside of the creek and we hoped it might get ignored. We knew that Brown's Creek and Spring Creek were where most of the Guntersville sticks would fish, based upon the results from the Waterfront Wildcat Two-day, the Rattletrap Tournament, and just dock talk. In addition, word was that even among these guys, the spots holding these fish were extremely small and it was a boat race to them. Since we didn't know our boat number, we couldn't bet on that, even if we found it.
Thursday rolled around and we were boat 11. For us, this wasn't a good thing because it meant we would be dead last for Wheeler in June and we weren't on any fish to make that early number pay.
Friday, our prefishing wasn't great, but it was consistent. The fish were extremely finicky and refused to hit moving baits, but they were locked into the edge of grasslines. At the pretournament meeting, we found that we had more success than most people we talked to and mentioning that we had caught around 10 fish and had 30 bites was miles better than most people had experienced. So, even though we were sold on where we were going and what we were going to do, we suddenly felt like we had a chance to make some noise.
Of course, the issue was that we had been catching only buck bass and while they were all keepers, we had no indication that there were big fish around them. So, we speculated a little. It had warmed some on Friday and Saturday was primed to see fish move up, especially the females. If we were catching the bucks, the females were behind, somewhere. Saturday would be a good day for them to move up from the first drop.
The run from State Park was long, mostly because it was cold. We settled into our pattern and were surprised that the only boats that went into Roseberry were headed to the very back. It wasn't a bad plan and we had planned to do just that, considering the numbers of big fish we've caught back there, including a nine-pounder two years ago. However, we wanted a limit first.
That limit was harder to come by than we thought. None of the deeper fish wanted to play. We might get bites, but they weren't committed. An hour went by with only short fish, so we began venturing off our spots. Despite not having been bitten on a moving bait on Friday, I picked up a crankbait. I quickly caught a short fish and a few yards later, the rod loaded up. Josh asked if I needed the net, but I was convinced that the fish was foul hooked. I told Josh not to bother with the net.
That was a mistake, but Josh had seen the fish and knew it was a good one. I went from thinking I had a short fish to boating a six.
Josh added a keeper about an hour later, but we fished until noon, recycling our spots, without boating another keeper. Truly, I was a lot of the problem. I could not get the fish to hook up on soft plastics. I don't know how big they were, but I couldn't get them in the boat to find out.
At noon, we returned to the exact spot the six came from. Two casts from me and one from Josh later, we had a limit that included a four and a couple of two-and-halfers. Again, we moved around and again, the pattern broke down.
An hour later, we returned to the spot and I had another good one pull off, but Josh caught another couple that culled us up. We had a solid bag, but time was running out.
We made one stop on the way back to weigh-in and fished channel swings in Seibold where Josh culled us about half a pound.
We were probably the 15th boat to weigh in and the first ten or so bags were all around 20 pounds and it seemed pretty obvious at the time that 18.50 wasn't going to be enough. In fact, we loaded up and started to leave when my wife texted me that half the field had weighed in and we were still sitting in 13th.
The way the fish had begun to bite when the sun came up, we figured the afternoon crowd would smash them. Still, the boats kept coming through and we stayed in the same place on the leaderboard. At the end of it, we finished in 16th, which surprised us to no end.
We caught around 10 fish and had around 20 bites. There were some things to feel good about. We did make adjustments. We had a feeling the fish were around. The issue is that most of it felt like luck.
But, hey, we are headed in the right direction.
As always, the ABT shines. There is a reason that teams from across the country come here to fish and it isn't just because the fishing in Alabama is THAT good. Of course, that certainly helps.
Kay, Clay, Robbie, and the ABT crew do a phenomenal job on each and every event and make it fun and almost effortless, despite having 225 boats to compete against.