The real reasons? I haven't been in front of a computer, at least, not for FUN. I, like many of you, have been tele-working for almost a year. The last thing I wanted to do when my work day was slow or completed for the day was continue to sit in front of a computer. There's stuff to do. Some of it fun. Some of it not.
I built an apartment for my mother in law. I bought a project car. I renovated a camper. I started a new job. Then, there is the ever-present struggle with keeping up with the kids schooling AND sports in a pandemic.
That's really just the start.
And yes, if I am being perfectly honest with myself, some of it HAS been struggles on the fishing front, but not because we haven't been successful in tournaments. It wasn't winter 2019 to spring 2020 great, but it was good. It hasn't been fun, though, and I think that is because of the shear amounts of fishing pressure all the lakes have been seeing over the past year.
I plan on updating everything now that I am in an office and occasionally have a few moments since I have to be in front of the computer, anyway.
So. Let's talk about the Alabama Bass Trail on Weiss. To refresh you all on how we've fished there in the past, I am putting the links to the reports.
Last year wasn't great and I didn't report on it. I will say this: it was tough and we caught five fish on essentially one dock as well as catching two decent fish on one stretch of main lake laydowns. That last bit is important for later. We did cash a check in 2019 when we finished 34th but the shear luck of finding three good largemouth on one dock makes it a good, yet forgettable fishing trip and story.
Josh and I rolled into Leesburg around 2PM on Thursday afternoon and fished until dark catching just two fish. We mixed it up a lot by fishing both new areas and some history and throwing a plethora of baits in all kinds of situations. Main river grass, shallow grass, current in the canal, long points, docks, just to name a few. Nothing seemed to work. That evening, we had dinner with a few friends who were down and they reported about the same.
We fished all day Friday doing much of the same and until around 2:30, we had caught three keeper fish in completely different areas doing completely different things. However, of those three keeper fish, one came off a main river stretch of laydowns that we had caught some on the year before. That largemouth came on the first laydown on a spinnerbait and we immediately pulled the trolling motor and went to a similar stretch in front of Big Nose Creek and reproduced it. It wasn't a huge fish, but it bit quickly doing the exact same things we had done at the previous area. We moved on and filed that away.
We pulled into a cove where we had experienced limited success in the past and on my first four casts with a shakey head, I boated three fish and pulled it out of the mouth of another. Of those three fish, one was a spot pushing four pounds. We had found our starting spot.
Saturday morning, we were a late flight and expected to find a boat on our starting spot. We were delighted that there wasn't, though there were plenty of boats around. Josh boated a keeper within the first five minutes on a top water plug, I missed one on the same bait before boating our second keeper on a worm. I missed another good bite on topwater before the fish all but disappeared. We moved to shore grass very close to us and I caught our third keeper on a frog.
We were not dismayed by the lack of bites as we had fully expected this to be an afternoon spot, anyway. It doesn't mean that we weren't disappointed, because we were. We thought we would at least have five fish off of it, considering the quickness we had gotten bites the last afternoon. We moved around the shallow point from side to side. We pushed deeper. We didn't get any bites.
What proceeded for the next six hours was a soul-sucking experience of moving around a lot without being able to catch fish. Oh, we boated a few including a forth keeper, but that fifth seemed to continue to elude us for most of the day. We fished what we thought was the better stretch of mainriver laydowns without any success and were about to flush that idea, mostly because this bank wasn't nearly as washed out from boat wakes as the points of Big Nose Creek, which were completely muddied up.
But, call it intuition or desperation, we gave it a shot anyway.
Josh quickly boated our fifth keeper, which was easily our best fish of the day. We lost the next fish, a solid 2.5 largemouth that busted the spinnerbait at the boat as it came over the top of the laydown. Sure, we were a little dismayed, but at under six pounds in five fish, it was hard to get terribly upset over just one fish.
We picked apart each laydown over the next fifty yards and essentially culled three of our small fish out on the first pass. Of course, the culls weren't huge culls, but they got rid of the barely keepers we had.
Then the big one bit.
Josh was finessing his spinnerbait in the elbow of a laydown on our second pass through and a four pound spot annihilated the blade.
We knew that this weight would put us around the cut-line for a check, which we assumed was around ten pounds. I don't think either one of us thought that the stretch would pay off any more and considering how the day had gone, we didn't think we could improve our weight much, if any. We ran our other similar stretch of laydowns, which did result in a very small cull but it was the only bite we got.
Now we had to make a decision. Do we go back to the well a third time? Do we look for similar areas? Do we go back to our starting spot? We wanted to do all these things, but we weren't sure which order we should do them in or how much time to devote to each. At this point, we had about two hours to do them all, so we decided to check a similar stretch we had found in years passed. Nothing. We started to run back to our starting spot only to find a boat fishing in the vicinity.
Back to the well.
At this point, we had one big fish, one decent fish, and three bigger than average fish. But those last three were hurting us. I boated another decent one that provided a solid pound-and-a-half cull, putting us in the twelve-pound range, which we figured was firmly in the money. Great moral boost. Fist bumping all around.
With thirty minutes of fishing time left, Josh swung on a good one and I netted her. While there had been some excitement for getting around the check-cashing weight, certainly when I put us in what we thought was Top 20 money, now we were thinking of winning. We had one more small one left which would provide us a massive amount of growth if we could, say, find a five-pounder.
Of course, that's a lot to ask for on a lake like Weiss, but the fact is, the fish were essentially getting larger with every bite and we were around largemouth, not spots, so it was conceivable that one could show up.
She didn't show up but that didn't change the feeling of excitement and the swings of emotion through the day. To go from essentially zero at noon to a Top 10 finish within basically an hour window was such an adrenaline rollercoaster.
We've now cashed a check every year, two on Weiss alone, but we've NEVER been within one bite of winning. Of course, at this point, we now know that the fish we didn't land would have landed us within the Top 5, perhaps even at 2nd place. It's also certainly possible that I missed one of those big spots early in the morning. They looked to be good fish.
We caught only 12-15 fish the entire day with almost all of them being largemouth. All five of our keepers were on a spinnerbait fishing laydowns on the main river channel. We ended up in 7th Place with 14.70, moving us up in AOY standings from 80th to 35th.
One of the things we've never done was consistently move up in standings. We've never made the championship before, typically because we fall apart in the last two tournaments of the year. Now we are poised to make our first Championship appearance on Smith Lake. All we gotta do is not suck on Neely-Henry....a lake we've consistently sucked on.
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