I haven’t had a chance to get a line wet in a since my last report. We’ve been pretty busy here lately working on a new website for the business. We should have a brand new site with a different format and more bells and whistles at the end of the month.

I went over to the lake house around lunch today to bring the dock in. The lake is right at a foot below full pool and the water in the back of the creek is still stained, but better than it has been. I kept looking at my trusty spinning rig with a spinnerbait attached, lying on the deck of the boat so I couldn’t help myself and I untied. Right now the creek is full of debris because of the quick rise in the lake level and the corps hasn’t been moving much water since the last rain. Water temp was 48 in the creek.

I hit my favorite area where I caught a decent LM on my last trip out and we got some good ones last year. Although myself and this fish were cold, the area didn’t disappoint on this trip. I was pretty satisfied after boating the LM in the pics below so I took a ride out towards the mouth of the creek and had no problems finding birds and stripers. I watched them and the birds for a while. Some of the stripers were very nice and rolling on the surface with birds circling and diving. I didn’t bring any striper gear today, but I will tomorrow.
Here’s a pic of nice creek fish on a spinnerbait.

I put a little French blade on my spinnerbait for more vibration and it really slows it down to a crawl. Great for cold weather spinnerbaits.

Crankbaits on 1-14-2014

Well, the weatherman said the sun was suppose to peek out yesterday afternoon so I went out about noon in hopes of some sunshine. Didn’t happen where I was at from noon till 3pm. I worked nothing but the crankbait yesterday and it was slow without some sun. I was concentrating on rocky points and a few docks. I had to go to a deeper crankbait out on the points.

I caught a few casting but when I realized it wasn’t going to be sunny I started cruising the 20-30 flat areas of pockets and bays off the main creek. When I would mark a few bass, I would quickly throw the crankbait straight out the back on a long cast and lock it down. At 2.5 mph the crankbait would quickly dive when I lock it down and would be in the right area of the bass when the crank got to it’s maximum dive. When it gets to the bottom of the dive you can cut the motor and long line also. As long as I keep the boat on a pretty straight line, chances are I would catch a fish. We call it “crank shooting” bass on flats. We’ll usually try a few different colored baits to see what they react to. One thing that is very important when doing this is making sure your crankbait is tuned to run straight. I was using 2 new crankbaits I just made and both were out of tune bad. If your bait is out of tune it will just do circles to one side or the other. You want the crankbait to run straight at higher speeds and scrape the bottom to rattle and kick up mud.
I had a lot of dinks trolling and nothing real big for the trip. Here’s a quick video of my two biggest, which wasn’t saying much.