I made it out to the creek 3 times over the past week. When we fished the last HD bass trail tournament a week ago, I caught most of my fish on the medium diving sand key crankbait around rocks. Although we fished the tournament on the north end of the lake I used the same crankbait in the creek over my last 3 trips and I’ve done well with it. I’ve caught some nice keeper bass by working the crankbait around the rocky points, shallow rocky road beds and shallow water markers. I’ve been keeping my boat in around 20 feet of water and working the crankbait from the shallow shoreline back to the boat. The smaller fish have been coming from the shallower 1-10 feet of water and the bigger guys have been coming from 10-20 feet of water. The key to getting fish with the crankbait is to find the bottom and keep it there as long as possible. Once I find the bottom with the bait I hold the rod loosely with the tip pointed down and I bounce the crank softly off the bottom. You want the crank to mimic a small bait pecking at the bottom as it travels along so a soft bouncing motion with the rod tip has gotten me more bites. The hits have been soft and most times the rod just loads up. Another pattern that has been working for us is throwing small plastic 1-2 inch swimbaits around shallow blow downs and grassy pockets. There are a ton of smaller bass and a few big spawners around the shallows right now and throwing small stuff around shallow structures will definitely net a few bass.

The water temps have been steadily cooling over the week and as of yesterday the surface temps were in the mid 60’s again. I have been seeing some surface activity and I’ve been lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time last Friday when I happened onto a striper and bass topwater feeding frenzy at mid creek in a pocket. I was able to catch a nice striper and 3 bass on the surface with the Vixen topwater plug. I gotta tell you, right now is the time to keep a good topwater plug tied on and at the ready. For the most part the topwater bite is just about non existent for me but every once in a while I can get a good fish on the Vixen if I time my cast right and I have perfect placement of the plug. There are stripers showing themselves in the creek right now. You can find some nice fish over the creek channel and pulling boards and freelines is a good way to catch a couple of nice big stripers on the surface. Soon we’ll be seeing a shad spawn and the crankbait bite should really get going good. It’s only going to get better as the water temps warm.

I’m going to offer a 2 pack of my two favorite Lanier medium diving crankbaits that have been producing for me on Lanier for the past year at a great price. These two cranks are a must if your fishing Lanier this spring and summer. These are hand painted with my Sand Key pattern and the two different body styles offer 2 different wobble patterns. Both baits have produced for us just about any month of the year and if you look through my photo page (https://castawayblog.com/pictures/) you can see the two crankbaits in some of my photos over the past year. These cranks have produced some big fish over the past year and now is your chance to get a couple of rare Cast Away custom crankbaits. If you’re interested in the cranks, just shoot me a message for the details on how to get the two pack. Here’s a picture of the two pack and one of the fish from last week.

I haven’t posted much lately but it’s not been from a lack of fishing. I believe I set a record for time on the water over the last 5 days. My sponsored striper team came over to Lanier from SC and they stayed at Cast Away Cove for the week. We spent five days pre-fishing for a big striper tournament on Lanier. I had to shift gears and go from bass fishing to stripers for the upcoming tournament. We mostly concentrated our striper fishing efforts to the north end of the lake because our resident creek fish had already moved through the back of the creek in spawn mode and back out to the main creek channel. Once they hit the main channel they are very hard to locate and track and we were looking for big spawning males and females still in the backs of the creeks.
From what I gathered over the past week, there are still stripers moving in and out of the creeks in spawning mode but the bulk of the spawn is over for a lot of areas. During the pre-spawn the stripers are very aggressive eaters and they were biting all over the lake for the past couple weeks while in pre-spawn mode. There are also a lot of staging fish in the mouths of the creek over deeper water. The tournament was actually won by a team fish over deep water pulling topwater herring on the surface. Our strategy was pulling big gizzard shad shallow, looking for a couple good bites a day from spawning fish. Over the five day stretch we didn’t have many good bites but tournament day was the only day that counted. On tournament day we fished up north on the Tee side of the lake and worked on some fish we had found in a feeder creek up river. The water temps were a little above 60 degrees and there were some stripers swimming around but not many eating. We finally popped a 19lber around mid day on a blueback behind a planer board. Turns out, it was a tough day for most teams in the tournament and we were able to pull out a nice 6th place finish and won some pretty cool prizes.
Here’s a pic of my teammate Patrick Miller and I with our tournament fish:

All in all it was a great time with the team but I’m wore slap out and need a few days to recuperate. Next week it’s back to bass fish with another big bass tournament next weekend.
Here’s a couple videos from the past couple weeks, including some nice stripers caught on topwater during the spawn.

Yesterday my partner and I fished the second tournament on the HD Marine Lanier Trail out of Little Hall Park. The weather and turn out was awesome, and I’m guessing 75-100 boats participated. We didn’t have a chance to pre-fish that much up north before the tournament and we stayed in the Chestatee arm in Lathem and Johnson. Fish were active on the surface where we were at and we were able to get on a pretty good jerkbait bite while the fish were coming up. Most of the fish we saw early were rising out of the brush and shooting up to the surface from 25-35 feet of water. We just put the jerkbaits right over the brush and made some slow subtle jerks with our suspending baits. Here’s a picture of the jerkbait we used:

This was a jerkbait that I started using a few months back and it’s been working well ever since. I think we caught better than half of our 10-15 fish off the bait and I was glad to see that my partner brought the one I made for him back in the fall. Once again, the fish that we were working on were all cookie cutter 1-2lb fish. After the sun came up, we went to work on the bank for bigger fish. We started hitting rocks with the cranks. We caught a few more fish on the crankbaits scraping the rocks and muddy bottom in shallow water. My little Sand Key medium diver was the ticket and a few of the fish we caught on the crankbait were suspended fish, just pulling the crankbait slow over a little deeper water in mid channel ditches. With the exception of a few smaller shallow fish, the best pattern for us was definitely working the jerkbait over brush early in the morning, just after dawn. Here’s a picture of the crankbait that worked well for us in the shallows and slow cranking over suspended fish. It was the smaller crank on the right:

All in all, it was a good day even though we probably made another mid pack finish and failed to bust double digits again. I look at it as a success because we have been able to fill a sack for both tournaments. I believe our weight was almost exactly the same as the last tournament right down to the ounce at just under 10lbs. The weather couldn’t have been better and the warm sun was a very welcome site after months of cold weather. The water temps where we were at were a little cooler than the south end and we were mainly in water in the low 50’s. I’d say the bass are very very close to moving up shallow, but for now a good plan is jerkbaits over brush piles early and then trying to find the big boys cruising the shore in the warm afternoon sun.

I’ve been making runs out in the creek frequently for the past few weeks to monitor what’s been going on and scouting for a upcoming bass tournament. Still, as of yesterday the blueback and threadfin die-off continues in the creek. I fished from the very back of the creek out to the main channel and still observed many birds diving on bait from back to mouth of the creek. This blueback die-off isn’t from cold water, as the water temps yesterday were in the mid 50’s range, but they are dying from what I call “ick” which is a yellow type fungus that builds up on the fish causing the fish to rise to the surface and into a circling gull mouth. I’ve also seen this on several threadfins that are stacked in the very back of the creek. I haven’t seen the ick in a few years and forgot all about it until I saw it again this year. I was chatting with another well know striper fisherman on Lanier who said he witnessed the same thing up on the north end of the lake last weekend. In the very back of the creek and going out to the Marina, the water is stagnated and has a lot of floating debris and a nasty film on the surface of the water that is reminiscent of the turnover. There is also a lot of dead bait littering the bottom of the shallow areas in different stages of decay. Under and around our dock, the dead bait is scattered everywhere on the bottom. I also pulled into a cut that always hold bass for us and saw a 2lb spot, dead on the bottom. I poked at it and flipped it over but saw no visible signs of damage and I hoped it was just a result of a gut hooking. This concerns me a little but I’ve seen no other signs of any dead fish in these areas. I think we need some good rain and the corps needs to move some serious water to flush this out of Bald Ridge. I’ve been watching for stripers and bass in the areas of the dying bait and it seems the fish have all but abandoned these areas. I have marked very few fish in the back of the creek and it seems that the fish are avoiding these areas as well as the fishermen. I’ve seen very few of either in theses areas lately. Once I get out towards mid creek, I can find bass off of points in 25+ feet of water and I’m still seeing some striper over deeper water in the creek channel near timber, but very few up shallow yet. These fish are tough to catch so we have moved our efforts to the more northern reaches of the lake. I would hope that the creek clears up soon because we are very close to a pre-spawn pattern and I’d like to see some of the nasty water cleared up soon.

Well, a week ago we were on the north end of the lake fishing the first tournament of 2015 in the HD Marine Tournament Trail. After pre-fishing a few days before the tournament we had a plan, and a few spots where we had been finding fish. I was still getting some fish on crankbaits and jerkbaits and we were also getting a few on the dropshot. On tournament day that all went out the window and we caught all of our fish with spoons. Go figure. We ran across a school of 1-2lb largemouth and after pulling in a limit of those fish we moved on in search of bigger fish, using the same patterns we had been on. We couldn’t find any bigger fish and we wound up finishing 32nd out of 71 boats, with a 5 fish limit weighing 9.45lbs.

I fished the creek during the past week on two different days and zeroed on both trips. They were limited to just a couple hours on each trip but it’s been slow. We’ve been testing some new baits lately so that can make for some slow fishing trips. Right now the water temps are around 47 degrees and fishing has been slow in the creek. We’ve been marking fish around docks and structure, but we haven’t found the magic baits yet. We haven’t been doing any crankbait trolling over the past few weeks but I’m afraid the majority of fish aren’t at a depth that is good for trolling right now. There is plenty of bait in the back of the creek and there are some crappie and buck bass feeding on the bait in the creek channel towards the back. I just haven’t been able to find any bigger fish in the creek in the last week or so.

In the last week I’ve been fishing the north end as well as the south end. On the north end of the lake, I’ve been concentrating on the Chestatee arm. The water up there is just a bit cooler than on the south end. The water has been stained from recent rains, but is clearing from Thompson down. The fishing up north has been tough for us. We’ve found fish but with the cooler temps, the fish are slow to react to anything. It’s the same pattern up there as it is on the south end. Find the warm rocks or warmer sundrenched areas and the fish will show up in the afternoon. There’s not going to be a lot of fish but the quality of the fish is good in the shallows right now. We’ve caught fish on worms, cranks, jerkbaits and spinnerbaits. Water temps are 45-47 up north and 46-48 down south. Here’s a couple of pictures of a couple nice fish over the last week.

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.