I fished 4 days last week including Saturday and Sunday. Sunday was the HD Marine tournament and our club tournament. My club partner covered the club tournament and did very well as a solo. My HD partner and I fished Saturday to pre-fish and had no problem finding a limit on 2 tactics. It’s been the same pattern for a while now with the topwater very early in the morning on humps and points followed by docks, rocks and shoreline. When I say very early in the morning I mean right at the crack of dawn. In the overnight hours the fish have been loading up on the points and by morning the fish are ripe for the picking. If no one has fished the points where we have been catching fish or we see fish come to the surface in the creek and those fish remain undisturbed, we called that a “green point”. It’s pretty easy to find green points on the weekdays. Most of the points remain undisturbed for hours and I can go from point to point and get first dibs on the fish that are cruising the point and feeding on the spawning bluebacks and shad that are also moving over the points. Here’s a quick video from some green point fishing early in the morning.

Those kinds of days are great for making cool videos but during the weekends things change with recreational and tournament fishermen hitting the points in the creek and reducing the number of green points very early. The idea is to hit as many green points as you can before the masses flood into the creek and spoil the fun. Another challenge you have once you start fishing the green points is those pesky stripers. There are a few times a year the stripers and bass mix together and you can catch a bass on one cast and a striper on the next. The problem is that when you’re fishing a bass tournament and a big pesky striper decided to snatch your lure, it wastes time….I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like fighting a striper as much as the next guy but you can’t bring em to the scales and time is money. This is one of the time gobblers from yesterday:

So yesterday, tournament day, our plan was to hit a big fish road bed I found followed by hitting the green points and then go to the docks after lunch. I found a nice road bed out on the main lake earlier in the week that held some good fish and from fishing in the same area earlier during the week I knew that it had been undisturbed by just about everyone for days. There were a lot of 3-5 pounders coming up very early and with the overcast skies predicted for the morning I figured we could get a good start with a nice fish or two very early on tournament morning and then assess the creek situation for green points. We were in the first flight so we were able to put the hammer down out of Little Hall and make it to the south end fairly quickly. When we pulled up to the road bed I popped a nice 4.10 on one of the first casts but after we netted that fish the stripers stole the show and snatched just about everything we put in the water which spooked the bass. We moved on to the creek and started hitting points, 2 of which were green. We were able to boat the other 4 fish to make up our 5 limit off the green points with 3 on the popper and 1 on a donkey rig my partner was throwing. When we moved to the docks around mid to late morning we only upgraded one small fish on the docks for an 11.50lb finish. We had a few opportunities for bigger fish and lost 2 very nice fish but it is what it is.

Basically the pattern has been the topwater popper early with follow-up baits like a light colored Sebile Magic Swimmer, Chug Bug or even a Fluke donkey rig will work. If the wind is up we caught a few using spinner baits on points and rocky banks. We’ve also been doing well for numbers around and between docks, very shallow, with the shaky head, donkey rigs and weigh less flukes. I’m still using the darker worms on the shaky head and sometimes it’s amazing how shallow the fish have been between the docks. Some of them were so shallow their little dorsals were still bone dry when I got them to the boat. LOL This little largemouth was one of the very shallow fish, hiding in the shadows.

Water temps are creeping past the mid 70’s and summer is on it’s way. I’m looking forward to more and more fish headed out to the main lake humps and the typical summer patterns.