After deciding that I was going fishing with my Dad and Brother yesterday, the hard part was planning on were to go. We decided that since we are all fishing with different partners in our next tournament, we should not pre-fish together 
. Then the idea came up to go fish pool 12. I have not been on this pool in about 15 years or so.
We put in at Spruce creek and went down to a small harbor and started fishing. We pulled not a single fish from here, we did have a northern jump out of the water after a jig that was sitting about 1 foot out of the water. Then we moved over to an area just across the river from Spruce Ceek. I right away got bit off while flipping a jig. We started working a bank that had a mix of eel grass and stumps. I quickly picked up 3 fish on a swimjig with one being 16″. We also got one fish on a flipping jig that was 15″. We worked back into a creek that was full of wood and pulled a few short fish. After that we worked some pads and all we had to show was a huge blow on a frog (the fish blew 2 feet behind my frog and would not come back).
My dad decided we should try around the ski lodge so we headed up river. We pulled two short fish out then my dad gets a blow on a Stanly Ribbit, we never see the fish until he went to swing it in the boat. The fish came off in mid air and bounced off the side of the boat and fell into the water. He was so upset when we finally saw the fish, it looked to be about 4 pounds. We got a few more short fish and headed up river some more. We could see fish busting ontop just off a island point. So thinking they were whitebass we headed over to see if we could have some fun. They turned out to be smallies be we could not get them to hit anything. Most of them look to be about 8″-10″ and they were sitting in 40′ of water blowing up on top.
We hit an area just down from there that was loaded with wood. Again we pulled small fish and one keeper. To end the day we went back to the area we fished 2nd. We started nailing fish. We let the wind blow us while we fished along. We made two passes down that bank and caught fish in both passes. I decided to try the point of an island that was right there and we wacked them on that spot as well.
We found a great pattern that held held most of our fish. Our best spots had eel grass and current. There also needed to be deep water with in about 20 yards. I got most of my fish with a blue and black swimjig. I did pull a few on a brown and black flipping jig and a Mann’s frog. My dad and brother caught their fish on a mix of frogs and jigs or texas rigged lizards. Between the three of us we landed 34 bass with 5 keepers. We lost a ton of fish at the boat including 3 really nice keepers.
I was really happy with our day on that pool after that much time away. I just hope I can make that pattern work some place on pool 13 and then again at the end of July on pool 10 
.
Jeremy