Here we are again, another Saturday and the feel of Autumn is just a few days beyond our grasp. Here in Georgia, football season officially starts at noon today when UGA kicks off its season with the Clemson Tigers. The days are getting shorter, and the lake is starting to cool. Back here in the back of the creek, the water is a bit stained, and vertical lines of bubbles are streaking to the surface from the floor of the lake as the lake begins its fall turnover. This will slowly work its way out of the back of the creek and towards the main lake over the next couple of months as the thermocline breaks down and the fish start orienting more towards the bottom in late fall. Until that time, we should have some fun topwater days ahead. I’m not sure it even exists anymore but years ago at Disneyland all the fastest roller coasters required an “E-Ticket” to ride them, and the e-ticket would cost extra to purchase. If you had kids that were big enough to ride the good rides, you usually purchased e-tickets for everyone so you could feel the thrill of the good rides. This week, topwater was my e-ticket ride on the lake and I didn’t bother with anything else.

I got to go out on the lake every day this week, but Tuesday and Thursday were short days due to physical therapy on the knee in the mornings. It’s going on 8 weeks since my knee replacement and that sucker is still painful. Some of it is from the therapy and some pain is self-induced from getting up and down in the boat every day. Probably, the best therapy is the boat activity, but I know that physical therapy helps, especially with the muscles around the knee. The pain is mainly bone pain in an area that had a lot of arthritis so in addition to cutting off the top of the tibia and fibula, they had to clean a lot of arthritis on the bone. That area is still sore. As far as knee function goes, the knee does well but I can only stand for about 10 minutes before I have to sit down and rest the leg. It’s mainly the muscles around the knee that are the weakest. The quad and the calf muscles are still weak, and my hamstring is still kinda messed up from the tourniquet. Icing down my knee several times a day helps with the pain and swelling and hopefully the pain will subside soon.

I’d say that the fishing is typical for this time of year and having Livescope for my first summer has been very interesting. It’s just amazing to see how these fish set up and react to bait presentation on Livescope and I’ve got to admit, it’s a game changer. For me, it’s just about 1 or 2 baits and moving around a lot. A few years back, you would have seen me sweating it out with a spybait and a drop shot rod in hand, plinking around a brushpile with a pretty worm and 2D, but these days with Livescope, I’m just swinging for the fences with those topwater explosions and moving on. Most of the time it’s pretty obvious as to what’s going to happen when approaching brush with fish on it, you make your cast over the fish and the fish tend to follow the bait. Usually, if there is a group, the whole group gets curious and follows the bait back to the boat. Some fish in the group are less interested that others, but they still tend to follow the group. The group may be ten feet below my topwater bait but still swimming with the bait directly underneath. The idea is to get the fish to react to the bait and come to the surface to get it. Most times they either lose total interest and swim down deeper away from the bait or they make a few quick runs at the bait but stop their charge just a few feet below, just short of the bait and then swim away beneath the boat. Sometimes one fish will break ranks and just shoot straight up at my topwater while the rest of the group will follow, schooling on the bait on the surface. That’s usually when the explosion occurs and that’s been my e-ticket ride this week. That only happens about 10-20% of the time during these hot summer days but it’s worth the effort.

Early this week we had mild early morning temps and the fish responded well. We also had a moon over head for the morning hours which I believe effects the bite. There was some wind to work with and when there is wind, there is topwater. In the world of topwater fishing on Lanier right now, wind is life. The idea was to match the patches of wind with the point or hump with structure. If I could find chop or wind over a brushpile on a point or hump out on the main lake or in the creek, the chances of connecting with a topwater fish went way up. The water is very clear right now, and the fish has the ability to throw the bs flag if something doesn’t look right when they are approaching my bait. This causes the fish to either stop short of the bait or blowup in a near miss. It happens a lot so I found that if I sped the bait up so they couldn’t get a good look at the bait, they tend to react better. When I was using the Ima Skimmer ko I always moved it fast through the water. Believe me, if a fish wants the bait, they’ll chase it down, no problem. I made them chase it down, so they didn’t have time to look it over. The way this helped was with chop on the surface. The choppy backdrop confuses the fish even more and the fish is more likely to make a bad decision and totally commit to the bait if there is chop on the surface. Early this week the wind was easier to find, and the temps were mild, but as the week progressed the wind was harder to find, and the temps slowly went on the rise. By late this week I had to cruise around to find patches of chop in the morning hours. Thankfully I have great vision when looking off in the distance and I could match the chop with an area that was holding fish whether it was a point or hump on the main lake or in the creek. It pays to know the lake well and know a lot of locations when scouting for those patches or areas of chop.

The way it worked for me this week was I usually approached my target area from up wind. This is important for me for 2 reasons, one is that I get a longer cast, casting down wind and the second is that you will be bringing your topwater lure against the grain of the surface chop. By bringing your bait against the grain, this causes more surface disruption and makes the bait more noticeable to the fish from down below. I’ve found over the years that the fish react better to baits swimming upwind, vice going with the wind on the surface. Speed of the bait was crucial, and my retrieve was fast, but I still wanted the bait to produce the side-to-side action, splashing on the surface to get the fishes attention. That’s what usually created the strike, moving the bait swiftly and creating more surface disruption. Moving the bait quickly across the surface worked well, but my biggest fish this week came from killing the bait. I found that some fish that followed the bait from below would just come shooting up like a missile if I just killed my topwater bait and let it float lifelessly. I found the pattern when I got distracted from my retrieve with a phone call or typing a text and letting my bait just float on the surface during my retrieve. Early this week I realized that fish would just come up randomly and just explode on the bait right in the middle of my distraction. For that reason, I started periodically killing my bait, about halfway back to the boat at random times just to see if I could get a fish to react to the lifeless bait. It worked a few times and just killing the topwater would create a strike from the following fish below. By late this week, the stopping pattern during the retrieve happened often. I only used 2 baits this week. First was the Ima Skimmer knockoff from Chuck Thrasher and “Lip Thrashin” Lures Monday through Thursday, and yesterday every fish came from the Azuma Zdog walking bait in the Casper Shad pattern. It’s been a favorite of mine on Lanier for years and I knew the fish had been getting a good look at the Ima baits lately.

All in all, it was a good week and to be catching topwater fish in late August, that’s a bonus. I think that Livescope has helped with that effort, but nonetheless, it’s been fun so far with Livescope. The heat has been tough this week but I’ve kept covered, move about 30-40 times in a day and I also have a big Igloo water jug with iced down water to drink on during the day. The lake temps are around the mid-eighties both out in the creek and main lake and the lake looks to be down a couple feet and falling fast. Here’s a few of my notable fish from the week. Hopefully cooler changes are coming soon.

A few weeks ago, I went back to my Ortho surgeon’s office to see if I could get another shot in my knee, but the doc said unfortunately it’s time to replace it. He wouldn’t give me another shot because I would need to wait three months after the shot to have my knee replaced, and the knee needed to be replaced very soon. The plan is to do knee replacement surgery on the nineth of July unless something comes open earlier but in the interim the doc said he wanted me to work the knee as much as possible, so it doesn’t stiffen up before the replacement surgery. Running and gunning the lake with nothing but topwater is just what the doctor ordered and so this week, I’ve just been following doctors’ orders.

This week was another week of nothing but topwater. We had some decent wind just about every day this week and I’m still working on 2 major bite periods with one being early in the morning, the other being in the afternoon/evening. As far as my bait of choice this week, it’s been pretty simple, it started out on Monday and Tuesday with the chrome Spook jr over and around brush and as of this morning, I’ve switched back to the chrome 95 Gunfish. It seemed to me that the Spook jr was more effective in the heavier chop because of the louder rattles but the Gunfish that I’m using has better flash. I’ve just about wore all the chrome of my only Spook jr and I’ve appropriately named it Jonah. It’s a long story but the name is fitting because of what this Spook jr has been through over the last 2 weeks.

A few weeks ago, I saw a little chrome Spook jr in a box of unused tackle down in the man cave, so I carried it down to the boat. It sat in my boat for a few days but a couple weeks ago I discovered that these afternoon fish were really responding to chrome so one afternoon I broke out the little chrome Spook jr and put it to work. It didn’t take long till I had my first fish on the Spook jr and I could tell from looking at my Livescope that the fish were very interested in the bait. I think it was the sound of the rattles that got their attention. It was definitely a different sound than my Gunfish and the fact that it was chrome really sealed the deal in the chop. After using it for a while and several fish later that day, I broke a fish off, which is kind of unusual, but it happens so I stayed around the area a while and I was finally able to retrieve my Spook after the fish shook it out. I noticed that the line broke right at my knot. It wasn’t till it happened a second time that I realized that the Spook had no slip ring at the tie point and so the flex point from constantly walking the dog was right at the knot. I use nothing but fluorocarbon on Lanier and the stiff fluorocarbon would break down after a period of time, right at the flex point. Twice the Spook had been taken by a fish and ultimately shaken or spit back out and I got the lure back. It reminded me of the old Biblical story of Jonah and the whale so I appropriately name the little chrome spook jr, “Jonah”. On Wednesday morning I took a buddy out in my boat and Jonah was working early while my buddy was getting some action on a chrome Ima Skimmer. The skimmer wasn’t working as well as the Spook jr so finally I told my buddy to tie on my Spook jr and I was going back to the chrome Gunfish 95. I had a brand-new chrome Gunfish, and the sun was popping out through the clouds by late morning. Wouldn’t you know it, my buddy never caught a fish on Jonah after he tied it on, but the little Gunfish put on a clinic for the next hour or so. I dropped my buddy off at lunchtime and came back out for a couple hours before the rain ran me off the lake on Wednesday. I decided to retire little Jonah in favor of the Gunfish and it paid off with some good numbers in the afternoon.

Yesterday I decided to head up lake and check out some of the offshore humps and a few choice points to see if the fish were there. I was pretty impressed with the population of fish offshore already. I’m kinda hoping that this summer turns out to be one of those summers where we have a topwater bite all summer long but that will depend on the bait and water temps. It’s pretty tough to sit in the sweltering heat with a drop shot or slowly cranking a spybait to get bit. I’d much rather spend my summer running and gunning with topwater and a big Igloo jug of ice water than watching paint dry with a fairy wand, but that’s just me. We’ll see how that all plays out, but it really won’t matter in a month anyway because recovery from my knee surgery will put me out of commission through the hottest part of the summer.

I started early yesterday morning, and the fish were really getting with it on the surface. I saw small groups of bluebacks creating wakes as they swam just below the surface, and I saw bass chasing those wakes down and creating some great topwater blow-ups. This week it was more about being in the right place at the right time early in the morning. If I could find where the fish were feeding, I could usually just quietly ease up to the area and wait for the fish to surface chasing the small groups of bluebacks. I could usually pick one or two off with a quick cast of the Gunfish if the fish were on the surface or had gone back down within a few seconds. You need patience for this but waiting for the fish to surface and show themselves can sometimes be a better plan than blind casting or trying to scope and cast to fish when they’re chasing bait, especially if there isn’t much wind very early in the morning. It’s been hard for me to call them up early so sometimes I’ve just been hanging out in an area and waiting.

Running up north yesterday paid off and I put a pretty nice sack together out on the main lake. It was all on the 95 Gunfish in chrome and once the sun came out, it was on with the Gunfish. Sometimes I could call them up and sometimes they would surface near the boat, and I could make a quick cast and snag one or two. Most of the fish were either coming from brush or just roaming around the brush on the ends of points and out on humps. I really didn’t rely on Livescope very much and just using mapping and waypoints as my target areas. By 4 pm yesterday I had put a pretty good sack together again and called it a day.

Today I needed to trailer the boat for maintenance, cleaning and putting a few decals on it. It’s had a pretty good run over the past few months so time for some pampering. I did fish a couple hours before trailering at lunch today and it was shaping up to be another good afternoon with topwater. I caught a few nice fish on the Gunfish again this morning before the traffic started getting bad, so I called it a week.

My two baits that I used this week was a chrome 95 Gunfish and the first half of the week’s success belonged to Jonah the chrome Spook jr. I think that the tempo or cadence that I was using made a lot of difference. I was using a pretty quick “walking the dog” pace with occasionally stopping the bait for a few seconds. Stopping it would trigger a strike if the fish were schooling under the bait. If a fish would miss the bait, I would quicken my retrieve and usually the fish would chase it down and ultimately get hooked. Other times I could kill the bait if they missed it and they would come back and get it. I’m using both baits on a 7ft St Croix Triumph spinning rod with a Shimano Stradic 2500 spinning reel loaded with 20lb Cast Co. Braid and an 8ft leader of 8lb Seagar red label fluorocarbon. Here’s a picture of the chrome Gunfish and Jonah the worn out Spook jr.

The lake started out with surface temps around 77-78 to start the week and today it was just hitting 80 when I came off the lake. The lake is a little above full pool, and I would suspect the corps is generating for a while in late afternoons and evenings. Here’s a few of my memorable fish from this week.

I took last week off so I could give my bum knee and left shoulder a break and a chance to rest. My only non-surgically replaced knee is just about ready to be replaced and I gotta say that right after our trip to Lake Hartwell it was very sore. I’m not sure how many casts I made at Hartwell but 4 days of cast after cast fishing had stretched those shoulder ligaments to the point that I would have to reset my shoulder back into socket after every cast. The week I took off allowed my shoulder to tighten back up and my knee to rest a bit. I can’t help but think that all those years playing sports and running races is now taking its toll on me. When it comes to sports and athletics, I’ve always said: “you can be good at a lot of things or you can be great at one thing”, I chose to be good at a lot of things. I’ve written this a few times before, but I’ll write it again. When I was in my late thirties I was stationed at a small air base in Belle Chase, Louisiana. The base had a weekly golf league and a pretty competitive softball league. The base was also just a few miles from the marsh and some of the best fishing in the country. My perfect day was an early morning fishing trip to the marsh, followed by an afternoon golf league match and to finish off the perfect day, a good hard played softball game under the lights. Those sports were a lot of fun, and I wouldn’t trade those memories for the world but all those things I put my body through are coming back to haunt me in the form of worn-down joints and lots of arthritis. Running around flight lines and flight decks, plus climbing all over fighter jets day and night didn’t help either. My body has gotten tired.

This week I was on the lake just about every day. I kinda eased back into it and by weeks end I had figured out a pattern that worked pretty well for me. It seemed that there was two different topwater bites going on, one in the early morning hours and one in mid to late afternoon. The one in the early morning hours was a “right place, right time” bite and the afternoon bite was a reactionary bite. In the early morning hours that I was out I kept my head on a swivel out in the creek to find where the fish were surfacing. I watched points and humps all around me because if there were fish surfacing, there were fish feeding on bait. If there was fish feeding on bait, it was on my list of areas to hit very soon. The way I caught my morning fish took some patience. I would pull up to a point and wait, not making a cast right away but just wait. I would say that within the first 5 minutes of me waiting, a fish or a school of fish would surface and reveal themselves. If I was in the right place at the right time, I could get a cast into the area quickly because the window of opportunity closed fast. I had about a 10-15 second window to get them to re-surface after they had gone back down. If they were still on the surface and I made a cast into them. it was a lock that I was going to connect. The biggest question was what I was going to connect with? It could be an 8-inch fish schooling with a few 4-5lb fish, or it could be the biggest in the bunch. Once again, this week I hooked 3 different fish on one cast, first being a larger fish that quickly shook off, then a dink that shook off, followed by a nice 3lber that I got to the boat, all on the same cast.

One of the most important aspects of my success in the morning was finding the little patches or veins of chop on the water’s surface caused by morning breezes in the creek or across the main lake. If I could find points or humps that had a chop across the surface, my key bait this week was the chrome 95 gunfish. That thing was deadly this week on my spinning rig with 20lb Cast Co. braid and an 8-foot Seaguar 8lb Invisex fluorocarbon leader on a Shimano Stradic 2500. My rod is a 7-foot medium St Croix Triumph, and I can shoot that little Gunfish like a missile with that Cast braid. Making a long cast was key also. Sometimes a fish would come up just out of casting range with straight flouro but using the braid has extended my casting distance by a good 30+ feet. Here’s a picture of a couple different Gunfish that did a lot of work this week. A big striper tore off with the split ring and hook on the bottom one.

After the wind died down about mid-morning this week, there was usually a lull in the action but about early to mid-afternoon the breezes would pick back up and I could chase the chop again. One good thing about the afternoon bite and using chrome baits is the flash effect. In the afternoon sun the fish would react to the flash from the chrome a lot. By moving the bait in a side to side, walking the dog fashion the bait would flash in the sun. the flash would cause the fish to school and react to it. Sometimes the bait would just be floating stationary on the surface if I got distracted and out of nowhere a fish would just explode on the stationary bait. I also watched schools follow the chrome bait all the way back to the boat without reacting to it but definitely the flashing chrome was the key in the afternoons and evening. Finding the patches of chop and matching it with productive areas was the biggest key to my success this week and having the right bait for the task put my fish in the boat.

The surface temps hit 80+ degrees on my Garmin yesterday afternoon and I saw plenty of schools of bluebacks moving around the creek from top to bottom. No visible thermocline has set up yet, but it won’t be long till we should be able to add a spybait bite and drop shot to my deck. The ale is a little above full pool and the corps is generating a few hours in the evenings. Have a safe Memorial Day weekend! Here’s a few of my bigger memorable fish from the week.

It’s finally happening folks. I’m slowly getting sucked in and re-programed from hoping to scoping. Right now I’m in the “scoping while hoping” stage of the Livescope transitional brainwashing and I’m kinda like a kid in a candy shop with chocolate in all directions. One minute I’m slowly dragging a worm down the end of a point and the next minute I’m chasing a fish or a group of fish 20 yards away, reminiscent of a cat chasing a laser dot all over the house. I can see the draw of being 100% Livescope focused rather than methodically working my way down the bank without the use of any electronics and just hoping I run across a fish. It’s like the difference between blindly shooting into a scattered flock of ducks or selecting a target and focusing on the perfect shot.

Yesterday evening kinda sealed the deal for me when it comes to scoping as I completed the whole gamut of catching fish from top to bottom. Most of the week I caught fish pitching the worm to fish I was scoping, and they were chasing the worm the bottom where they would pop it…..or not. I think the hookup ratio was about 1-10 this week pitching the worm. Another way I caught fish this week was throwing the Keitech/Damiki rig over brush or pitching it to random fish I’d see while scoping but yesterday evening we got into a flurry of surface activity at dusk, and I got to use the 2.8 Keitech/Damiki for fish right below the surface. That was a new experience for me, and we had fish surfacing all around the boat at times. If the fish didn’t show themselves on the surface, I could scope out their location and we could cast to them. It was pretty cool to watch a group of fish a foot below the surface and see my bait approaching them in a collision course. Because of the anticipation, swinging on a fish can be premature at times and yesterday evening I found myself missing as much as connecting. Definitely a faster paced environment when dealing with schooling fish on the surface but a lot of fun with the scope.

I fished from Monday through today this week, and I had some decent sacks to show for it. The staging locations often frequented by the older generation of 4-5lbers in late winter or early spring has now been taken over by the younger generation of 1-3lbers. Numbers-wise that’s cool but size-wise it is lacking this week. The big girls are in transition from staging to spawning and they may get just a bit harder to find at times as I’m not a bed fisherman, so the size of my fish may be down for the next week or two. On the bright side, numbers will be up and there are going to be plenty of aggressive fish all around the shores of our lake for the next few weeks. If you are a bank fisherman, it’s your time to shine and there are plenty of parks that you can stretch a line on some shallow bass from the shore.

It seems that the bulk of the fish are still oriented to the bottom but there are a lot of fish hanging out over the top of the brush or in small groups, just kinda cruising around the brush piles. Since we have bottom oriented fish and suspended fish right now, we have options, and lots of them. I only needed 2 options this week, but I also threw the chatterbait and spinnerbait around a bit in the wind with no joy. It was the worm and Damiki/Keitech combo that did it for me this week. The good thing about the Keitech bite is that I’m no longer dragging it on the bottom at the speed of a three toed sloth but using it similar to the spybait in the summer, with a very long cast around a point, a ten-count drop and a slow, steady retrieve. Just like the spybait, the rod just kinda loads up when using finesse gear and a fish hammers the bait with that long cast. Here’s a video I made from spring a few years back and the slow rolled Damiki pattern.

In the past I’ve had good success with dropping my shaky head straight down under the boat when I’ve seen suspended fish chase my bait down on the 2D, so it only makes sense that I could have success pitching my shaky head to suspended fish I’m seeing with the Livescope. That pattern worked well for me with the shaky head as I cruised down the bank, I was either throwing the shaky head at targets on my mapping or pitching the shaky head to targets on my Livescope. Time after time I watched the suspended fish on my Livescope chase the worm down and the more aggressive the fish chased the bait determined whether they would strike the bait or not. Sometimes they didn’t let the worm get to the bottom before grabbing it. I caught a few this week that grabbed the worm on the drop.

My favorite target area this week was probably docks. Sometimes they were around the docks and sometimes they were in between the dock. I just had to throw the worm around or look at my Livescope to get an idea where they were. The shallow docks were really in play this week as well as those empty slips and a few spud poles. It seemed like the dock bite was more prevalent in the afternoons, so I mainly spent my morning on points with the Livescope, focusing on brush piles out on the ends of points. I was either sitting off a point and throwing the Damiki swimbait around the brush or throwing the worm up into shallow water rocks and then heading to the docks in the early afternoons. That’s not to say there aren’t fish on the docks in the morning hours, I just think it’s better around the docks in the afternoons. Perhaps it’s the black floats heating up in the sunny afternoons or it could be the shade that the docks provide. Either way, the docks probably produced the best numbers, but the rocks and points produced the best quality for me this week. My worm choice was the Zman big TRD on a 1/4 ounce Boss jig head and my swimbait choices were a Trixster Kamikaze head or Lanier Bait Damiki head with a 2.8 Keitech.

The lake level is about 6 inches above full pool and the corps have throttled back their generation periods. The water temps kinda dropped back down a bit this week and when I left the water today it was around 56 out in the creek. Right now, is a good time to be on the water as there’s a lot of active fish and we should have some very nice spring days ahead. Here’s a few of my memorable fish this week.

Things are right on schedule in the creek right now and we’re quickly approaching another spawning season for our bass population. I haven’t seen any spawners here in the back of the creek yet, but the water has been cold and stained so I don’t have much visibility around our dock and out in the cove. We’re still about 10 days away from the next full moon and those 10 days should be good overall when it comes to feeding fish. The bite window for the fish is getting wider and wider and this week there was a good mix of 2-4lbers eating in a lot of areas in the creek. The biggest task for me this week was finding the bigger fish and putting a pattern together to find where the bigger females hang out, especially early in the morning hours because that’s when I’ve been struggling for the big fish bite. The rocky secondary points in the sunny afternoons usually provide a bigger female or two and a little spike in my adrenaline, but where to find those same females early in the morning has been my biggest question this week. I think I found my answer about mid-week when I noticed that my bigger morning fish usually came from the deep dark shadows where I’m pretty sure those predatory bass instincts are just waiting for something to invade the dark shadows of a steep rock bluff. That was my target this week.

This week it’s been more about mapping than it has been about scoping. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve pretty much had my scope on all week, but my eyes have been more fixated on making casts in a certain zone rather than a certain target. I’ve made some progress with scoping this week and I was pretty proud of myself yesterday afternoon when I was picking bass off the top of brush, “cast to catch” with the scope. I have yet to catch a 5+ scoping but I’m sure that will happen very soon. This week it was mainly about the shaky head, and I had the opportunity to get out early in the morning a couple days during the week. I’ve been throwing the little Keitech around early in the mornings this week but random long casts with the Keitech/Damiki head hasn’t started producing random large fish yet. That bite is just around the corner for me but for now the shaky head is still producing the best bang for my buck. The key has been to fish it slow and the 10 second rule is in effect. If you’re not familiar with the 10 second rule, it’s the amount of time between the time the worm hits the bottom and when you first move the worm. Short hops and 10 second pauses between hops. These fish are like cats when it comes to worms, they’ll sit there and stare it down and if it doesn’t move, they’ll pounce on it after a few seconds pass, especially if other bass are in the area. These spotted bass are very competitive when it comes to a possible food source, so the more bass there are around your bait, the better chance you’re going to get bit. Unfortunately, most times the bigger bass are smarted and let a smaller more aggressive bass get the meal, and I wind up hooking a 2lber while a 5lber is escorting my 2lber to the boat. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the phrase: “Dang, you see the one that was with him!” That’s usually my luck, I’m bringing in a pesky little buck bass while that big momma is following the buck to the boat.

Even though the worm accounted for the bulk of my fish this week it’s a good idea to keep the little swimbait very handy and ready to cast. Last Friday I was approaching a secondary point to fish around a brush pile and as I was picking up my rod, I heard a splash and saw a big swirl out over deeper water, at the end of the point. I thought that maybe it was a loon, but I made a cast into the swirl area with my little swimbait and immediately hooked up with a solid 3.5lber. On my very next cast into the same area with the swimbait the rod loaded up again but this time it felt like a dump truck fell on my swimbait. It was a great fight to the boat with finesse tackle and the little Trixster Baits Kamikaze head with a 2.8 Keitech. It’s my biggest so far this year. Here’s a picture.

In my last report in early March, I embedded a video showing the target areas I frequent during the early spring when fish are staging. The lake is full of these areas and the lake is full of bass so any of those secondary points and underwater outcroppings can come into play in the early spring. Good mapping with color shading at different depths can come in handy this time of year when looking for those bigger female stagers. Here’s the Staging 101 video again and another good staging video I made to help explain staging bass on Lanier.

Another area that produced pretty well for me this week was docks. I’ve been seeing a steady increase in dock activity over the last few weeks, and it seems that the bass have started hanging around the docks. One day they might congregate out in front of the dock and the next they’ll be cruising in between the docks in open space. In the afternoons they could be inside the shade patches, inside the empty slips or hanging out next to the spud poles. You just need to make the casts to see where they are or refer to your Livescope and target what you see. Once again, the worm was my choice and the deeper docks produced the best for me, and a big bonus was deeper docks with big chunk rocks around. For some reason, these bigger bass have been hanging out in deeper, shady area around docks with dark chunk rock or a rock bluff early in the mornings. If you find all those elements, there’s probably going to be a big bass hanging out there. You just need to be the first one to get there and catch that big girl before another angler hits that area. If there was rocks and docks with deep water, I probably fished it this week and succeeded. The biggest key to my success in these areas was to fish the worm very slow. I watched these fish react to my worm on Livescope and sometimes they just hover over the top of the bait in some kind of standoff or stare down and then after 4-5 seconds, maybe more, they suck it in. That’s why I’ve been working the worm very slowly. It’s not an ideal situation if you suffer from some kind of attention disorder because some of these strikes are so subtle and infrequent it’s like watching paint dry at times. I get bored and I get frustrated. Yesterday I lost 2 fish that were over 4lbs at the side of the boat and that kinda rattled my cage for a minute but I bounced back and caught a nice fish to end my day. It’s good rewards but slow fishing with the shaky head at times but I haven’t found a better pattern yet.

Yesterday evening I took Lisa out in the creek after our dinner, and we spent an hour or so running a few docks that were out of the wind. We were both using a big TRD in the same worm color and I had just replaced our very last worm on Lisa’s shaky head. She had a nice fresh worm and I had and old chewed up worm that had been through quite a few fish. I started us off with a nice 3lber from the end of a dock and right after I released my fish, I saw Lisa’s rod load up and I knew it was big. It was a nice fight for Lisa and I think it’s her biggest this year so far. It was a great catch and a very nice way to end the week. Water temps were around 60 degrees in the creek yesterday evening and the lake is a little less than a foot above full pool and dropping because the corps is generating several hours a day now. Here’s Lisa’s big 4.7 from last night and a few other memorable fish from my week. It’s a great time to go out and drag a worm around!

Typically, this time of year I don’t have a lot of baits on the deck, but I always have a Damiki rig or some type of small swimbait like a 2.8 Keitech attached to a 1/4 ounce or 3/8 head. When we get into February the lake is usually at its coldest and the fish are usually at their slowest. Their metabolism has slowed them down and they don’t really get excited about much. Chances are, the fish are going to be in small groups, rather than big singles cruising the shoreline looking for meat. The small groups are going to be hanging out in unsuspecting places at times and if you catch one, it’s a good idea to make multiple casts in the area because more than likely there will be more. It’s also a good idea to put your caught fish in the livewell when focusing on an area and release the fish when you leave the area. By releasing a caught fish in the area, you just caught it, often times it will spoil the bite and shut down the action. By holding the fish in the livewell for a bit, chances are you can extend the bite, especially when targeting ditch fish. Right now, the bearings are going out on my livewell pump so it’s the worser of two evils, I can release the fish boatside and take a chance on the fish swimming back down and telling his buddies that there is danger above or do I keep the fish, turning on my livewell and listen to the deafening squeal of the worn out bearing in the pump for the livewell?

I started out on Monday in Jeff Nail’s boat after a 28-day layoff from the lake. The water was around 48 degrees, and we were hitting the ditches early on a cold morning. It didn’t take long for Jeff to boat the first fish in 40 feet of water with a little swimbait on a 3/8-ounce jig head from Spot Choker. He showed me the new Spot Choker head and I got a few from him to try. I also got a few of Trixster Baits Damiki heads and between the two different heads we were able to put 9-10 fish in the boat by days end, mostly on the swimbaits out in deeper water. I threw my favorite shaky head worm around when I thought the terrain looked like wormy stuff, but I came away with very little on the shaky head. For that reason, Jeff and I stuck with the little swimbaits for the majority of the day. The cool part was that I got a good look at forward facing sonar again and I’m going to have it very soon on a newer boat.

On Tuesday I felt like hitting the lake again and ditches, swimbaits and worms were on my mind. I just had to test the rocky worm bite but that is at a lull for me. My usual wormy stuff just wasn’t producing but that’s the way the worm bite is at times. It can good or bad and when the shaky head bite isn’t going well, you need to adjust, but I was left wondering why the fish were either, not on the rocks, or on the rocks, but not interested in my shaky head. Since Jeff and I caught the majority of our fish relating to ditches I abandoned the rocks in favor of the ditch bite. The ditch bite can be frustrating and sometimes you have to spend some time shopping the ditches but when you find the right ones you can go back for days and the ditch will still produce. Such was my case this week. I didn’t have many successful ditches to draw from this week but the ones that I found successful, gave up fish every day this week. It might be a “one and done” ditch but I could circle around, coming back a few hours later and there would be another fish to take the place of the one before. It’s a “right place, right time” scenario in ditch fishing but one thing that can dip the odds in your favor is the presence of loons and diving birds. I pulled into a pocket with a small ditch on Tuesday afternoon and two loons were working in 10-15 feet of towards the back. Sometimes these loons will get the bass moving around by stirring up the bait and a Damiki rig with a 2.8 Keitech is my choice to cast around the areas of working loons. I like to steer clear of casting into the loons but working the swimbait around the outer fringes of the working loons can produce a good bass or two. On Tuesday afternoon it worked well out on the end of a dock, where the loons were working, and the ditch met the end of the dock. Here are back-to-back 4+ spots on a Trixster Damiki head.

On Wednesday I didn’t spend a lot of time on the water and it was a slow day. I was still able to put a few in the boat on the Damiki.

We recorded our fourth podcast and celebrated Jimmy Sanders birthday Wednesday even. Here’s a link to view Friday Fish Fry #4.

Here’s the difference between a 5lb fish and a 2.14-ounce fish, both on the 3/8-ounce Spot Choker head with a 2.8 Keitech. One caught early in the morning and one later in the day.

Yesterday morning I was back at it and easing up on my lucky ditch when I saw it, something that doesn’t occur often but when it does, the stripers and/or bass are nearby in big numbers. It’s the presence of fish poop. I see it every year, usually during this time of the winter but not limited to this time of year, it’s just more prevalent this time of year. You can’t mistake it, it’s just splotches of brown, wet poop looking liquid with a backdrop of green water. Usually, it’s visible when there is little to no wind, as the wind and waves tend to break up the poop splotches rather quickly. Looking for or seeing fish poop dates back to my days of running the marsh for redfish 30 years ago. Even redfish poop indiscriminately while feeding and finding the poop in the marsh meant finding the redfish.

After seeing the poop splotches scattered around amongst the floating pine needles, and the direction of the light breeze from the west, I triangulated that the poop was coming from a nearby point, so I set my sights on the end of the point with my Spot Choker swimbait rig. My first cast produced a nice striper and during the fight I looked down at the graph and it was like spaghetti underneath the boat. Stripers were everywhere, and I thought to myself that the poop mystery was solved. If there’s a moral to the story folks, “where there’s poop on the surface, there are fish feeding or fish that just fed in the area. Here’s a video and a picture of the striper I caught with the help of the poop.

After the fight and subsequent release of the striper, the whole ditch cleared out and the stripers were gone so I moved on. I continued to catch a few fish here and there on the little swimbait but I wanted to switch over to a spot choker underspin and drag a few areas with that, mostly the ends of points in deep water and the center of ditches in shallow water. At one point early in the afternoon I ran into Jimmy Sanders, and I spot locked near a deep point I was fishing while we talked. I like to multi-task so while talking with Jimmy I was simultaneously dragging my underspin down the side of the point from 30-40 feet. That has been my deep-water target depth and where most of my fish had come from this week. As we were talking, I felt my underspin stop and pull back and I quickly recognized that I was in a game of tug of war with a nice bass. Jimmy once again was my luck charm and I like visiting with Jimmy out on the water because our visit usually results in me catching a nice fish lately. Here’s a picture of the fish and the bait used.

All in all, it was a pretty good week and I’m glad to be back on the water. The lake level is less than a foot below full pool and the corps is only generating for a couple hours a day if that much. The water is still stained back here in the back of the creek and the water temps on the surface in the creek was 48-49 early and 51-52 by late afternoon.

It was 10 years ago that Lisa and I purchased our property on the lake as a 10-year anniversary gift and investment property. When we first looked at this property, it had been on the market but there we no takers after the 3-month listing. It needed a lot of work on the inside and the dock was on dry ground because the lake levels were down around 10-11 feet lower than full pool. Some of the shallower water property values around the lake were dropping because of the low lake levels. I myself was skeptical but we purchased the property with the understanding that it would be an investment. It seemed like just a few days after our closing, then came the rains. It rained and rained that first year and our dock never saw dry ground again for years. Since then, I’ve learned the lake levels always trend one way or another but we’re heading into a period that levels usually trend upward, and I would look for the lake to be on the rise over the next few months. When lake Levels rise, fish will forage the newly submerged shoreline on the warmer sunny days so hopefully it will be a good winter for the shallow meat-eaters.

This week I was able to get out a couple of days, but I had to alter the game plan due to the rise in lake levels over Christmas day and into Tuesday. The back of the creek looks like my Carmel Macchiato coffee right now and that definitely throws off the bite in the back of the creek. I cringe every time the water gets this discolored because ultimately, it’s just more silt coming into the creek and over time silt can turn a body of water into a marshy pit. Construction near the creek is a big culprit and a lot of the silt can come from washed out construction areas during heavy rains. It’s an ongoing problem on the lake but it’s hard to stop the runoff during very heavy rains. Usually when the water gets stained like this it’s hard to get the fish to bite. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that they just can’t see the bait or they just don’t want to bite. There are still fish in the area but for the most part they are rather inactive or disinterested in whatever I’m throwing. For that reason, I choose to find the cleaner water areas that don’t have the run-off that the back of the creek has.

I was able to get out mid-morning on Wednesday and I spent 4-5 hour in the creek. I checked the shallow shaky head bite and didn’t really like the way that was going, plus the sun was behind the clouds most of the day which kinda negates the shallow rock bite. Luckily, while trying to put a pattern together in the early afternoon I saw 2 loons hanging out in a cove about the size of a football field. I noticed that the loons had 3 gulls circling above and sometimes the gulls would dive bomb the water’s surface around the loons. I could see that the gulls were successful and coming away from their dive with a bait most times, so that told me that there was bait present around the loons. As I watched, I saw some big swirls and splashes that were not coming from the loons or the gulls, and I knew the bite was on back in the cove. I abandoned the shallow rocks and made my way to the cove, picking up the little 2.8 Keitech swimbait on a 1/4-ounce Greenfish “Bad Little Shad” Albino colored swimbait head. I had the bait tied onto 20lb Cast Co. braid and a 6-foot leader of 8lb fluorocarbon. I can cast the Cast Co. 20lb braid a mile even with the lighter finesse baits and the longer cast comes in handy when you want to cover a lot of area per cast. To be honest, the swimbait bite is a lot easier on my shoulder than jerking on the spoon all day in a ditch.

As I eased into the mouth of the cove, I started marking fish under the boat at 21 feet and I started making casts up shallower with the little swimbait. I could see swirls that the fish were making around the loons here and there and shortly after my little swimbait found the bottom on my first cast right down the middle of the cove, a nice 4lber found my little swimbait. The trick is to keep just a little tension on your line at all times because when these bass hit the little swimbait it can be very subtle, or very noticeable. It can feel like your retrieve just got a little heavier or it can feel like a very pronounced pop. After landing the 4lb fish I very quickly readied my bait for the next cast. I could see some larger fish coming up in the shallower areas along the shoreline and I thought that a few of the bigger ones could have been stripers or very large bass. I worked my way towards the back trying not to disturb the feeding bass and birds and for the next couple hours I caught fish in the cove just going back and forth from about 25 feet up to around 5 feet of depth. The loons were working bait very shallow, and the bass were right there with the loons, but it was hard to catch them very shallow with the swimbait. Most of the fish came from a depth of 10-20 feet with a mix of smaller fish here and there. I ended the day shortly after 3pm and headed for the dock. I caught around 8-10 fish total with a few nicer fish in the mix. Lots of fun in shallower water with the finesse tackle. Here’s a couple pictures from the afternoon fun.

Thursday morning, I wanted to get out a little earlier than the previous morning, so I left the house around 8am going right back out where I left off the afternoon before. I wondered if the group of fish I found the day before had spent the night in the cove or moved on from where I had left them. One thing that I think was very significant about this area is that the cove was very near deeper water. By deeper, I mean water in the 40–50-foot depth very near the mouth of the cove. I believe the fish moved back and forth from the deeper water to the shallower water depending on the conditions and to prove my theory I started marking fish in the 35–40-foot depth early in the morning and the fish were scattered, lying motionless on the bottom up to about 20 feet in depth. There was no bait or loons in the area and the fish were just shut down for the most part. I could bounce the little swimait off their head underneath the boat in the shallower areas and they would just swim away from the swimbait like it was an annoyance to them. Finally, after a dozen worthless casts my first taker of the morning popped the swimbait at around 20 feet in depth. It was a nice keeper in the 3lb range to kick off the morning. I saw a swirl on the surface not far from the boat and I threw the little swimbait right where the swirl appeared and let the swimbait sink. Nothing hit the swimbait and just as I was giving up on the cast very near the boat a bigger fish whacked the little swimbait on the retrieve. Best fish of the day came from the bass pictured below chasing down the swimbait very near the boat.

After just a few fish to show for the shallow bite, I elected to go back out and work on the deeper fish in the 30–40-foot depths and that’s where I found the most active fish. It wasn’t much in the deeper depths but every once in a while, just fan casting around the mouth of the cove in the 30-40 depths produced a good fish. The key to getting the fish to react was to drag the bait very very slowly. This is “Three Toed Sloth Season” which means to slow your presentation down, whatever that presentation might be. There may be a few exceptions in certain circumstances where a faster moving bait may create a reaction strike in certain areas but my focus was on the sure thing and there were enough fish around the area that I didn’t leave for the 4-5 hours I was out. It was in the sun, not much wind to fool with, and the occasional fish fell for the little swimbait on light tackle. What’s not to like about that? I ended my day in the early afternoon hours with 7-8 decent fish for the trip. Here’s a few more from my day.

The lake levels continue to rise, and we are sitting at 6.61 feet below full pool right now. The back of the creek is very stained and water temps are in the lower 50’s right now out in the creek. This time of year, it’s a good idea to watch your surroundings and if you see loons and gulls working around shallower areas there’s a good bet the bass could be working beneath and around them. It’s always worth a look.