This week was a doozy and I hope I can get a reset this morning in church. It all started on Monday morning when I was dealing with the worst toothache in the world. The man-pain needle was pegged off the charts but I had a dentists appointment in the afternoon so I just ate a bunch of Motrin and went on about my morning. It started at the McDonald’s drive thru when the lady taking my order got snippy with me because I asked for a “regular” biscuit instead of a “plain” biscuit. Apparently she wasn’t able to make the correlation that early in the morning and with my toothache I was in no mood for McDonald drive thru shenanigans. She got snippy, I got snippy and then I told her I would help her out and cancel my order all together because I wanted a Hardee’s pork chop and gravy biscuit anyway so our transaction was over and I drove away mad. As I drove by the window to give her my stink eye I looked at the lady I was speaking with and she looked young and frazzled. It almost looked like she had been crying as we looked in each other in the eyes and I thought that maybe she was having a bad day too. Then I felt bad because my sore tooth was probably minuscule compared to the problems she may have been facing and that’s the moment when my punishment began this week. It just went from bad to worse as the week progressed…

On the fishing front this week it was fun. I was still on my little swimbait bite from the week before and I was still having fun with that. I was mainly fishing an area I named the horseshoe gauntlet because the brush piles are shaped in a large horseshoe on a flat and the bass mainly cruise the inside of the horseshoe shaped brush looking for bait. It’s like a big 40 foot across underwater corral of bass and a lot of fun when they eat what you’re throwing. I just hit the spot lock and make casts inside the coral with the little swimbait, letting it fall and dragging it till I feel the tick. The gauntlet had been reloading with bass very frequently so I could leave and come back 2 hours later for more fun. Most of these fish were the 1-2lb variety but every once in a while a bigger fish would show up. I was fishing the BFL tournament on Saturday so I wasn’t really thinking of the gauntlet for a tournament spot. The gauntlet is more of a minor league warm up spot before you go find the big girls out in the deep or you need a quick fix if you haven’t felt the little tink tink in a while. Here’s a picture of some of my gauntlet fish this week.

I also ran across another little bite that was cool this week and provided some bigger fish and that was the little ZMan ned rig combo. These deeper docks have been holding a few bigger fish and I found out this week that they were looking for the smaller stuff so I sized down my worm to a ned rig and started pitching it around deep 30-50 foot deep docks. It was a lot of fun but it was slow fishing. Once again, like the swimbait, the bite was slow but rewarding. Here’s a few fish from the ned rig.

Once the rain came I slowed down with my fishing and just tried to manage my toothache pain until Friday when we had a root canal scheduled. It was a necessary evil because my toothache pain was reaching unbearable stages and I needed it done before the weekend. Root canals haven’t changed any by the way. They are still as painful as I remembered from years past. Anyway back to the fishing. My neighbor and I hit the creek for a bit Thursday when it wasn’t raining and we ran across a few schooling stripers in a quiet cove. We both tied on a little weightless fluke jr and had some fun. My neighbor David has a friend from Louisiana that had recommended a recipe for striper so we kept a couple for David’s table fare.

When Friday morning arrived I was in the dentist chair bright and early getting a nerve drilled out by a dentist who lied to me. He said it was going to be fun and we were going to joke around during the procedure but the only joking we did was right before he hit a active nerve with his tiny drill and joke time was over. I think I would just as soon taken my chances with trying to pull a tooth from a greased up bobcat rather than sit in that chair and let a dentist hollow out the root of one of my molars. So we got the root canal out of the way and I got a few pain pills and a pat in the rear before heading home. I immediately ate one of the pain pills and relaxed for a while before heading down to the boat to get my gear for the morning tournament. After I let the Hydrocodone kick in real good on an empty stomach I took off trotting down to the dock and slipped and fell on our stone paver steps damaging my right arm. I had enough of being poked for one day already so I had Lisa just butterfly it up for my tournament. I think our doctoring skills need help but we got it fixed up only to have it come apart during the tournament.

Yesterday, tournament day it was my first time as a co-angler and I had a good time even though the weather sucked. We fished up north for a while and then came down to the south end. We hit the gauntlet briefly and I caught my biggest fish of the day, a solid 3 plus and my partner boated one also. We mainly fished docks with worms from that point on and I boated 3 more fish while my partner zeroed on docks. I wound up with 4 fish for 7.8 pounds and a 35th place finish out of 224 co-anglers. I got a little check and felt pretty good about the day after seeing some of the sticks that struggled along with me. It’s been a long week and it’s been filled with a lot of pain and suffering for me so I’m going to spend a little time this morning trying to get right with the big man upstairs and see if we can get a reset for next week. Have a good week!