First off, I gotta admit that I’m a climate change believer and if the climate didn’t change, I’d be worried…. unless I was back in San Diego or Hawaii, it seemed like the climate never changed there. Nonetheless, this week feels like my old sweaty friend Louisiana came up for a visit and brought me a gift of sweltering heat and 152% humidity. I could tell it was here by the humidity dripping from the Georgia pines at 5am when I stepped outside to let Chigger out for his morning pee. I’m pretty sure this is just a precursor to August when Louisiana comes back to town in the form of a tropical wave with biblical rains for days but it’s just some of the joys of living in the south.

The fishing

This week was a tough one for me in terms of getting out on the water. I got sick late last week and thought it might be that mutated covid strain going around so I laid low for a while. Early this week my knee went all “bone on bone” pain and I met with my ortho doctor for options for the knee plus a pat on the butt and a yummy cortisone shot to kick the can on down the road for a few months. Ultimately, I’ll need to have the knee replaced but for now it’s just shots. The suspected mutated covid strain and the painful knee definitely slowed me down this week, but I was still able to get out and throw a few new baits that I haven’t tried in a while. Early this week I was thinking spoon, and not just any spoon but a big Georgia Blade spoon. Early in the morning there has been some wind out on the main lake and if there was a good chop on the water, I was throwing the big white pearl 5-inch spoon this week in low light and cloudy skies and then switching over to a chrome spoon if it was sunny. I like the 5-inch Georgia Blade spoon because I can cast it a mile with my bait caster and 17lb test fluorocarbon line. I made a video this morning and you can see the big Georgia Blade spoon in action in my “On the Cast Away Deck” video further down in this report.

Another bait that’s re-surfaced like another old friend this week was the emerald popper. It was probably my second-best producer this week coming in just behind the spoon. I used the popper in the afternoons over brush if there was some chop over the brush. If there was a small to moderate chop over the brush piles in 20-25 feet of water, I could call the fish up at times. It wasn’t a sure thing, but it seemed like the better popper bite has been the afternoon when these bass are chasing bluebacks on or near the surface. No big ones on the popper but some nice blow-ups during the week.

The third best bait I had this week was the G-fix 80 spybait in the American Shad pattern. It just seemed to net me some decent fish out on the main lake this week. If there wasn’t any wind to work with and I didn’t feel like throwing the spoon because of a lot of structure of brush in the area I chose to run the little spybait over the top of the brush. It was a great bait for numbers, especially earlier this week.

After I beat up the brush with the topwater and spybait stuff, I’m moving in for the kill with the drop shot. The drop shot has been the best for us in the afternoon and evening time but has been a little tough for me in the morning, so I’ve been sticking with the moving stuff in the mornings.

I’m planning to start changing my format a little bit and moving towards a podcast over the next month. My plan is to have videos from the current week or use some older videos from my YouTube page as a reference and narrate the videos from the man cave. I haven’t done a “On the Cast Away Deck” video in a few weeks so I made one this week and posted it below. The water temps were around 86-87 out on the lake this morning and the corps is generating in the afternoons through early evenings. Water level is 1.2 feet below full pool and dropping. Here’s a video of the tackle I used this week and a very nice fish I caught on a Georgia Blade spoon around the 8-minute mark.