Read about all of my Fishing Adventures!
Boy, do I have a story for yall. If you've been keeping up, Josh and I finished 16th in the Alabama Bass Trail event on Guntersville and Brad and I were set to fish a club tournament this past weekend. Normally, we would get out in Brad's boat and prefish a bit. But, as life (and weather, mostly) would have it, there was no way to get out and fish. You can read the report on that by clicking the link below.
Anyways, the weather was set up almost identical to the previous weekend. That is, from overcast and rainy to post-frontal with a slight warming trend. Josh and I had run a pattern the Friday before of fishing points with shakey heads (now that we are done on this lake for awhile, I can talk about it more). On Saturday, the fish were off those points and while we could get a bite occasionally, we couldn't hang into them. We eventually found the fish had moved shallow onto docks, probably because of the lack of clouds and bright sun.
In other words, in 24 hours, the fishing had flip-flopped, but at least we were NEAR the fish. So, Brad and I planned on doing the exact same thing, since the conditions were so similar. We put in at Waterfront and waited until it was time to make the run up river to Roseberry. But when Brad put it on the floor, the boat wouldn't get up on plane.
So, he tried and tried to get the boat on plane, meanwhile I'm sure we looked like newbs that didn't know how to trim down. It was about the time that I could hear all the laughter from the pros that were prefishing for the Bassmaster Classic that I looked back to see that the rear of the boat was under water.
I'd seen this before and after hastily getting it on the trailer, we discovered that a livewell inlet had been sheared off. After wrapping some plastic worms in electrical tape, shoving it into the inlet, and then taping it some more, we were ready to go. Unfortunately, we had lost an hour of fishing.
About the time we passed Goosepond, we noticed that the net was gone from the front deck. Where it went, we still do not know. So not only did we lose an hour of fishing, we had lost our net, too. I wasn't too worried because I didn't have a ton of faith that we would need it, but I digress.
We started out on one of the points in Roseberry. After getting two or three very tentative bites, it was obvious that the fishing was indeed going to be the exact same as last week. So, I headed to the one dock we had caught fish on the previous week.
We were rewarded fairly quickly with the fish pictured above on a square bill. After an hour of fruitless fishing, we began to move around to other points Josh and I had caught fish on. A bite or two aside, we put nothing in the boat and returned back to the magic dock. I produced another solid keeper on a chatterbait.
We repeated this process, but managed to run into just one more keeper in other areas before we spent the remainder of our day on this one boat dock. By this time, the sun was very high in the sky and the water had warmed to around 52 degrees from the 48 degrees we saw earlier that morning.
About that time, we discovered that there were a pile of decent sized males on the end of the dock and for the last hour, we consistently caught fish. By the day's end, we had caught just five keepers with a host of non-keepers. I had also broken off two fish, for reasons I don't know. We also missed a ton of bites as they just didn't want the shakey head, but wouldn't eat ANYTHING else.
It took 16 pounds to win, 15 for second, and we checked in at 3rd with 13.5 pounds. There were few limits and the big fish of the tournament was just over five pounds. The ramps were covered up with pros and there was a lot of traffic on the lake, though about the same amount as there usually is.
Anyways, it was the first time in YEARS that I had caught five keepers on the G in February and while we have caught some TOADS this time of year, you gotta have five. Water clarity was still an issue and the continued rain is going to cause the fish to be in disarray for the time being. So, if you find an area that produces more than two boats, hunker down.