Andrew Oliver and I hit the road again in the OLEARY Buick GMC Sierra on another bass fishing trip. The truck just turned one year old and it is as good as the day I picked it up. The only cost to operate so far is a couple of oil changes and tire rotations. The guys at the shop said to ignore the old 5000k rule for oil changes and follow the oil monitor system instead. Easy on the wallet and good for the environment.
The plan for today was to do some deep water drop shot fishing but mother nature has a way of making her own plans. It was a wee bit too windy to hold the boat over the isolated structure that we were going to fish. Just like a tournament day when things don’t go as expected, Andrew and I just went fishing to try and figure out a pattern.
We tried fishing the outside edge of a sand/gravel bar that is usually a good summer spot. It rolls off quite quickly from about two feet into seven and the fish usually set up on the drop, but not today. We worked around this area with tubes, senkos and Flutter Worms and picked up the odd fish but certainly nothing to get excited about.
The wind was blowing pretty good so we went out into the open water and fished spinnerbaits over some rock piles that came up to within a couple of feet of the surface. When the smallies are using this type of cover it is the perfect situation to burn a spinnerbait. Even with the wind moving the boat along, the high speed Curado enabled me to keep the bait moving at a good enough clip to entice some bites. As I always do when fishing smallies, I added a trailer hook to my spinnerbait for those short strikers. It is amazing how often you pick up a fish on the trailer and sometimes it is a real smasher. I will mention that I don’t usually let the wind dictate boat speed but we were trying to cover water looking for fish. Normally I fish into the wind so that if a fish follows to the boat and misses I will blow back away from it rather than have the wind blow me over it. Gives you a second shot at the fish most of the time.
We had tried fishing some windy areas with mixed results so we thought we would go shallow and calm for a while. The wind was coming from the South and we had pretty much had enough of that for a while so we went to a shallow cove on the South end of the lake to cut it off for a change of pace. Andrew did really well here fishing a spinnerbait and I was picking up the odd fish on a Flutter Worm. These fish were very shallow and they seemed to come out of nowhere when they hit. They were tucked in beside the rocks or small weed clumps and just came blasting out from the cover to hit the baits.
On the rockpiles I was fishing a ½ ounce Terminator tandem willowleaf spinnerbait with a Gamakatsu trailer hook added. I was throwing it on a Crucial 6’8” M casting rod with a Curado 200 DHSV reel spooled with 20 lb Power Pro.
For tubes I was using a Compre 6’6” Medium rod with a 2500 Stradic with 8lb Seige green monofilament line.
For the Flutter Worms and Senkos I bumped it up to a 6’6’ Medium Heavy Crucial with a 2500 Stradic spooled with 20lb Power Pro and a two foot Seaguar Fluorocarbon leader in 12 lb test.
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