Bars Don't Work for Me as Fishing Can

We got out on the reservoir in the middle of the afternoon, struggling against a fairly strong headwind, riding towards the back. I was looking for a line of submerged boulders we had once fished when the reservoir was full, expecting to see it somewhere up on the grass-covered shore. We did see a point not far beyond where Fred cut the engine and we began drifting.

I cast a tube jig, and besides getting one tap that might have been a sunfish, the nine to 24 feet of water we fished seemed completely barren. After a foreboding half hour or so, we motored to that point, where to my surprise we found that line of boulders I had looked for. I cast the jig towards the bank and hooked up a few seconds later. A smallmouth about a foot long leapt and threw the hook.

Soon we anchored near the point, boulders under the boat and to the left and right, along with some stumps and narrow tree trunks. I felt curious about the three- to four-inch diameter of those trunks, because they've been down deep under the surface for many decades now, and they haven't decomposed. Part of the reason they're still there, perhaps, is due to the reservoir's low fertility--less organic breakdown.

We fished there for what felt like many hours, picking away at the bass. Small ones. One of Fred's smallmouths was 13 inches. I had said, "You would think all of the bass in the reservoir would come here, there's so much dead water." Shortly thereafter, action picked up.

But that's not the only spot. It's a really good rocky spot, but I remembered the last time Fred and I fished here from his boat, in 2015. Near one of the towers, I had noticed weedbeds we didn't have time to fish that day. This evening, as we approached the spot, we noticed we would be out of the wind. That calm surface itself felt inviting, because it was a break in the general pattern of choppy surface. It seems to make no sense that calm surface on a reservoir otherwise riled up would make any difference to the fish, but that's not how the situation felt to me. 

On my first cast with a Senko, I caught the largemouth in the photograph above, good-sized for bass here. (Click on the link below for information on the unusual lack of sizable bass.) I cast where it appeared the weedline ends about 12 to 14 feet deep. Soon Fred caught a nice smallmouth. Then he tied on a topwater plug, catching a largemouth as dusk fell. (He also caught a redbreast sunfish and rock bass on the PopR.)

All told, we put 14 fish in the boat. Four smallmouths apiece. Two largemouths apiece. A rocky spot. A weedy spot.

For me, the best part of the day was fishing while anchored on the rocks. We talked more than we usually do, because we weren't involved in navigation. Just casting and slow retrieves. We got out of ourselves. At least I did, and Fred wasn't off somewhere else. Some people do that best at a bar, but bars just don't work for me as fishing can. 

                                                     Population Survey