Our club decided Fathers Day would be a good morning to hold a bass tournament. We got started at 5:30 am on Wildwood Lake, but the weather made for an interesting day.
My partner Gordon and I started out in one of the creek channels. It was calm and the water was clear. I started out the morning with a black with blue flack Venom Salty Sling targeting the weed lines. Gordon began with a scum frog. It seemed to start kind of slow, but after twenty minutes or so I finally hooked up with a keeper. Gordon also had several blowups on the frog but didn’t hook up with any. We found that the bass weren’t real aggressive. They would hit the bait once, but wouldn’t hit again. If they blew up on the frog and I immediately followed up with the salty sling they wouldn’t touch it.
A little bit later I hooked up with a nice bass on a weed line near the edge of some brush. This bass swam where it wanted and it wanted to swim into another brush pile. I hooked up with this fish about 20 yards way from the boat and had I known there was a brush pile about 10 yards out I would have fought it a bit harder. We got a quick glimpse of the bass, but still didn’t get an idea of the size of it, but it was a lot bigger than anything else I had on the line all day. To make a long story short she wrapped me up in the brush and came off. We fished around the weeks and brush a little longer. I believe we both caught a few, but nothing to brag about.
Every once in a while we would hear some rumblings in the distance. I mentioned them and said that I hoped it was a empty grain truck hitting a rough patch in the road. Then a little later we heard them again, but a plain rumbled by shortly after. As much as we wanted these rumblings to be something different I check the radar on my phone and sure enough there was a small storm headed straight for us. We fished our way back out of the creek. As we hit the mouth of the creek we could finally see out in the distance that there was definitely a storm brewing. Just then Gordon hooked up with a decent bass. After messing with that we put our rain gear on and headed back to the ramp. There was a small line of boats waiting to load up. A few cracks of lighting and everyone seems to hurry up a little. We barely had 2 hours of fishing in and the storms were pushing us off the lake. Looking at the radar it looked like it would blow over in about 20 minutes. We all waited it out in our trucks. Well the 20 minutes stretched into 40 minutes and then an hour. At 8:45 we decided at 9:00 we’d decide whether to stay or not. Miraculously at 9:00 the storm moved out and we could see blue sky’s on the way. We ended up waiting out the storm for about an hour and 15 minutes. It rained pretty hard the whole time and several waves of marble sized hail came through as well as a few very close lightning strikes. So we regrouped and hit the water for another 4 hours.
We went back to the creek channel and noticed the water was rising pretty fast. I caught several more keepers on the Venom Salty Sling, but decided to leave as you could see the mud coming into the lake and killing the water clarity. Back out on the main lake Gordon hooked up with a decent bass he caught on a jig on the point of a fishing jetty. We caught a few more bass. I think Gordon hooked up with a few on a 10 power worm. We fished various other areas of the lake and caught fish at most of those locations. The whole time we noticed how fast the water was rising. Several people camping had to move their tents to higher ground while we watched another tent that ended up in 2 feet of water. By 1:00 it appeared the water had risen around 4 feet and made loading the boats quite interesting since the ramp was way under the water.
Overall we had a pretty decent morning. It was a good way to get out early and enjoy Fathers Day, but many of us were eager to get back home to spend the rest of the day with our families.
Good report, man!