Wired2Fish on Location - Guntersville - Final Report
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3/26/2010 10:14:10 PM |
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Final Report
Today we hit a spot we found earlier in the week for most of the day. When we got there this morning, the wind was blowing pretty steady out of the Northwest. It shifted to the North later in the morning and then continued shifting around to the East. The wind was cold and the skies were dark and overcast until around 3:30 p.m. The water clarity was stirred but still fairly clear -- maybe a couple feet at worst.
We hit a point where a creek channel swung in and touched an underwater point with a lot of big rocks and brush. The fish were schooling. We caught them early and often on jigs and Zoom Brush Hogs on Texas rigs. I decided last night, I wanted to fish a Texas rig. Call it a gut-instinct, but the way the fish had been hitting Carolina rigs and jigs this week, I felt like I'd have a more direct connection to my lure crawling it around the brush and big rocks.
The hunch paid off. In about 20 minutes, we had five keepers for around 14 pounds. We continued to upgrade. We boated a 4 1/2 -pounder on a jig, then a 4-pounder on the brush hog. We boated several fish between 2 1/4 pounds to 3 3/4 pounds as well as quite a few short fish. We stayed on the spot most of the day because we wanted to see how many bass we could boat on this pattern. We boated 55 bass before leaving the area. We had more than 30 keepers. Our best numbers day by far.
We left and hit our best size area but it was covered up with other boats fishing the same stretch. We fished off of it a bit and managed another 4-pound bass. We stayed until we caught four more bass to get to 60 bass. The weather was less than favorable and we didn't break 20 pounds, but we did come close with 19 pounds.
This week we had hoped to be sight fishing and fishing shallow around the grass. Unfortunately the lake is way behind on the spawn cycle because of the long harsh winter Alabama has experienced. It maybe helped that we weren't local to the lake and had to figure it out on the fly, rather than going with what we thought should be happening on the lake. I had heard a lot of folks did find fish shallow. We never really got on anything consistent shallow unless it had deep water close by.
The top baits for us this week were football jigs, Arkie jigs, Zoom Brush Hogs, shaky heads with Zoom Mag Finesse Worms. Our road-warrior friends from Illinois caught a bunch of fish on Carolina rigged Zoom Lizards and Strike King lipless crankbaits.
Terry and I boated a 26-pound limit on Monday, a 24-pound limit on Wednesday and 19 pounds today for the best five. We struggled on Tuesday and ran short yesterday because of colds and bad conditions on the lake. Fishing is about what the fish are doing and not what we want to do to catch them.
I love to throw a jig and was glad when I boated the first 5-pound plus fish on it. That sort of clued us in for the right pattern the rest of the week. Terry and I knew there was something special about our most successful bank the very first pass we made on it. It had all the text book attributes to make it a special spot. A creek channel turn, a long flat point, an abundance of shad and eventually we found that it had the big bass we had hoped for.
Terry and I both caught 7-pound bass. Terry caught a 6 pounder and we both caught several 5 pounders. It was a great week at Guntersville. We were able to get a lot of photography done for future stories. We shot some video and we came up with several ideas for new features for Wired2Fish fans. We hope you enjoyed the series. Let us know if you'd be interested in something like this in the future.
Goodbye Guntersville for now!
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