A buddy and I launch the boat on a pool 4 backwater at about 5:45 this morning since it had been almost two months since we’d fished together. Or apart for that matter. There was a lot of surface activity, and it didn’t take long to determine that it was white bass [stripers in my vocabulary]. The school was really moving and we opted to pass on them and focus more on some large and small mouthed bass. We had a weedline that stretched for maybe 3/8 of a mile along a channel with current on the opposite side of the channel. We started fishing the currented side hoping for some smallies but they didn’t want to play, so we went back to our starting point and sought out largemouths. Maybe after a third of the length of the weed line had been fished thoroughly there had to have been some anomaly that we couldn’t see or detect because in a 40-foot-long section we nailed 7 really nice bass. One right after the other, two doubles, and then it was over. We went back over the same exact spot again and caught one super duty sized dogfish. We fished the entire stretch to it’s end then back again and never saw another fish or hit.
The seven bass were all between 3.5 and 5 pounds. They all came on a 4.25″ hand poured bait very similar to the Fat Impact from Keitech. Watermelon brown with red flake over pearl and watermelon red flake over pearl took five of these fish while pro blue over pearl did in the last two. I’ve seen spot on spot locations before but have never seen such a tight spot with that many decent fish on it in the river system.
We fished the current side after not finding any more fish on the idle side and came up with a big goose egg, but the 7 bass we caught were really a reward coming from such a small spot and not having fished for 2 months.
Its amazing how much havoc that high water caused. The last time we fished there was two days before the water began to rise. There were huge beds of water lily and lotus just starting to bloom, that were now entirely gone. That channel we fished was maybe 40 feet wider from weedline to weedline with nothing in between where there was always weeds. The depth thru that channel increased by about two feet too.
We’ll be back next week and our little hot spot is now a way point on my gps. Maybe it’ll do us well again, maybe not. But it certainly was fun this morning if not weird to see that many quality fish in such a compact spot.