Winter Creekin' With Reel Krazy, Part II

When you're "Reel Krazy," you jump at every chance to go fishing when a warm day comes in January.  Or a cold day, for that matter.  The Saturday of January 30th, 2016 happened to be one of those Chamber of Commerce Saturdays that fishermen dream about when the dead of winter rolls around.  Lows in the upper 30's, highs in the upper 50's - just plain pleasant compared to the sometimes miserable weather we come to dread this time of year.

Jason Hopper, Shane Young, Todd West, Zack Turner and I met at one of our favorite waterways - a beautiful, relatively under-pressured stream in northeast Alabama.  I had been to this particular creek twice before.  The first time I caught 24 fish, and the second time I caught 11 fishing a different  section downstream.  We were back on the upper section where I had smoked 'em the previous summer, and I was quite excited to be back.

When I fished this section last summer, the gauge was in the 80-90 CFS range - very low and very scrapy.  On this day, it was a different creek.  Most of the rocks I had to carefully maneuver around in August were submerged, and the shoals were quite swift.  The gauge was around 530 CFS that morning.  Still, the place looked inviting and fishy as ever.

The place lived up to my expectations within five minutes of me being on the water.  After a couple of short strikes on the first few casts, I downsized from a worm to a grub and landed a nice largemouth just upstream of the put-in.  It was 18.75 inches, and had a lamprey attached to its stomach.  I did not weigh the fish, but it was probably not much over 3 pounds because of the parasite. She was long but looked a little bit skinny under the pelvic fins on the Hawg Trough.

Photo by Jason Hopper

Off to a good start

Three casts later I landed another small largemouth, and I got to thinking it was going to be another day like the one I had last summer.

After that, however, things slowed down for quite a while.  A few of us would pick up a fish or two along the way, but none of us were slaying them.  I had brought my GoPro along for its second voyage.  I thought I had the nice largemouth from the first few minutes of the trip on camera, but it turned out I had done something wrong, and did not get any of the footage from that catch.

Later, I would get a decent spotted bass on camera that would turn out to be my first fish caught live on the GoPro.  At this time, I did not have an over-the-shoulder mount setup, so I either had to do the "hero" shot from the bow of the boat, or do a low-angle POV from the Mad Frog Gear dashboard.  The latter was what I used while catching the fish, but I was able to turn it around for a pose and capture a nice still-frame.

One of these days, I hope to be embedding some quality videos within my posts, but right now, trimming and putting together dozens of clips seems like a daunting task. The GoPro software doesn't seem very user-friendly, and my old Mac doesn't have the memory to play 1080p video very smoothly.  However, I did trim down a nice little underwater video of me releasing a largemouth I caught later in the day.

That largemouth was caught in a stretch of slack water that we hit just after lunchtime.  There was a nice set of shoals that provided a bit of a class II rush at 500 CFS, followed by sandbar on river left where we took a break and ate a snack.  I decided to wade fish a bit before we hit the slack stretch, but didn't catch anything.

This particular stretch of slack water we hit after lunch proved to be the best fishing of the day.  All five of us started catching fish, including some really healthy fish.  I even caught my personal best spotted bass - a 18.75" fat girl weighing in around 4.5 pounds.

Zack with a nice one

Shane with a monster largemouth

My personal best spotted bass - Photo by Jason Hopper

At the end of the day, I had pulled in seven bass, with my best three totaling 51.75".  It was not a tournament, of course, but it was a personal best 3-fish total length.  It was a far cry numbers-wise, from catching 24 fish, but the quality of what I did catch more than made up for the decrease in quantity.  Even if the day had turned out to be a complete skunk, it was still nice to take advantage of a nice January day and get out on the water with some good friends.

CBY "Frostbite Biathlon" #1 - January 16, 2016

Since I have bought my kayak, I have been pretty much laser-focused on becoming a better bass angler.  But I was raised on crappie fishing.

An opportunity to do both competitvely presented itself to me a few weeks ago on Chickamauga Lake.  The Chattanooga Bass Yakkers held a casual, for-fun type tournament on January 16th, and the  scoring format was the total length of the best three crappie, plus the length of one bass.  It was a ten dollar buy-in with a pack of plastics or a lure going into the big bass pot.

The last multi-species tournament I entered, I had a really tough time managing my time and focusing on catching different species, and it was a tough bite.  I still haven't figured out exactly how to plan for these types of tournaments, but here's how I tried.

During prep & planning, I asked myself a simple question.  What lures do I have that will effectively catch both crappie and bass?  I came up with a short list:

• inline spinners
• drop shot
• jigs
• beetle spin
• float-n-fly

So it was going to be a light tackle sort of day - not something I'm very used to on a lake like Chickamauga.  I ended up rigging four rods:

• A shakey head setup, because it's my confidence bait for bass.
• A dropper rig with a non-traditional bait - more on that later.
• An ultralight rigged with a panfish magnet under a bobber.
• An ultralight rigged with a regular crappie jig.

The Diablo Amigo rigged and ready at Savannah Bay launch

The morning of the tournament was chilly, but nowhere near unbearable, and the high temperature was going to be in the mid-50's. A dozen of us showed up, and launched around 8 AM from Savannah Bay.  I didn't have to go far to catch my first crappie. I caught it on a panfish magnet by the bridge piling about 20 yards from the launch about a 20 minutes into the day.  Unfortunately, it was too small to reach the increment markings on the Hawg Trough.  I stayed by the pilings a while longer but didn't get another bite from the crappie.  I did miss a hookset on the shakey head, and reeled up just a fish scale about the size of a nickel.  There were reports of some big freshwater drum being caught in the area that day, so I figured that's probably what I missed.  Not the species I was after, but probably would have been a fun fight from the yak.

I had fished a Reel Krazy tournament from the Savannah Bay launch late in the summer of 2015, and caught a limit that included one really nice largemouth in an area near the junction of Savannah and Wolftever creeks a little over a mile from the launch.  I fished a few good looking spots as I started making my way back to that area, and picked up my only keeper size bass of the day off a bluff wall, a 12.5 inch largemouth.

With a bass under my belt, I now had to focus on catching more crappie, but occasionally throwing the shakey head in high-percentage areas to try and cull my bass.

Not long after catching the bass, I pulled another tiny crappie and a bream from a large blowdown.  I fished the blowdown for almost an hour before I headed the area to the creek junction I had planned to spend the rest of the tournament fishing.

The rest of the day was a skunk, except for a small bass taken on a crappie magnet near another brush pile.  I threw the panfish magnet in a couple of different colors, a Bobby Garland minnow on a jighead, and a chartreuse 1/16 oz jig, and got one bite.  I even used a streamer fly on the dropper rig. I had one bite on it as well but no fish. That was a complete shot in the dark - I wanted to try using a fly on a conventional rig.  While I wasn't successful using it, it's something I want to try again sometime because I believe it could work, either on a dropper or drop shot rig.

The crappie needed to grow.

I went back to the 1:00 weigh-in to turn in the photo of my bass, and that 12.5" total was good enough for 7th place out of 12.  We got off the water just in time, because the wind picked up that afternoon and it got very cold.  We all expected better results with the pre-frontal conditions but the crappie bite was slow to almost non-existent. Most of us caught small ones but keepers were hard to come by. The winner of the tournament turned in 32.75" on two crappie and a bass. No one had a full four-fish limit.

Frostbite Biathlon #1* wasn't a complete failure because I caught five fish, and caught the target species.  But it could've been better with some frying pan sized crappie instead of baby ones.

*Frostbite Biathlon #2 was held on 1/30/16 out of Ware Branch, but I did not participate in that one.

Winter Creekin' with Reel Krazy, Part I

Mild weather and a period without much rain made it possible for me and some of the Reel Krazy fellas to hit the creek on January 9th.  It was my first time on this particular creek, and it was quite a nice paddle, not too far from the house, with some good scenery and a few hungry fish.  I met up at the park by the takeout with  Jason Hopper, Jim Clark, Jim Ware, Shane Young and newcomer Zack McElveen that morning, and we took off to the put-in.  Thanks also to Clint Henderson for helping out with the shuttle even though he wasn't able to fish with us. The water was a perfect hue of blue-green and we were all ready to take advantage of the conditions and enjoy the day.

Meeting Up

It didn't take long to get a few bites, but I was missing fish early in the trip.  Eventually, I was able to catch three fish - 2 spotted bass and a largemouth.  The better of the two spots and the largemouth both measured in the 14-15" range.  The last spot really made me happy because it was like getting a birdie on the 18th hole.  I had gone a while without a fish, then finally hooked up on a finesse worm  in a deep hole about 20 yards from the takeout.

Thanks to Jim Ware for the grip-n-grin photos.  Also, check out his blog at Rivergoat Kayak Adventures - you'll enjoy his accounts of his many travels in the plastic boat.  I had met Jim at a couple of events, but this was my first time to share the water with him, get to hear some good stories and talk fishing.

Largemouth in the Channel Bend

Spotted Bass near the Takeout

Stand-up Paddling Among the Rock Formations

Rock Formations at the Takeout

The Reel Krazy Fleet

Ringing in 2016

New Year's is a time in which hope springs eternal - new goals are set, resolutions are made. Aside from my personal, spiritual, and family goals, I set a couple of fishing resolutions as well.  One was to learn some new techniques, and the big one was to catch my first smallmouth and shoal bass.

Those smallmouth and shoalie trips will come later in the year, but I did get to go fishing on January 3rd for the first time in 2016.  I loaded up for an afternoon on Lake Acworth.  I had gotten a GoPro for Christmas, and I was hoping to break it in with some epic footage of a struggle with big bass. Or a small bass. Or a medium sized bass.

I had removed the stock 1/4"-20 screw, and replaced it with a Ram Tough Ball in the well-nut under the back of the carry handle on the bow of my Diablo Amigo, and I had a Ram mount adapter for the camera set up to get that "hero" shot of the hookset and the landing.

Not too long after launching, I found out that I needed to conserve battery life as much as possible.  Forty-five minutes into the trip, the battery was dead.  I had a 64GB card and thought I would get several hours of footage, but did not realize the battery life was only 55 minutes. (I had spent about 10 minutes learning to sync the GoPro with my phone via WiFi, so that cut into my filming time as well).  I did not get a bite in the first hour, so no epic fish fight today - just some paddling and casting.

The southeast fell victim to some major flooding over the Christmas holiday, and while the water levels had receded a lot, there was still a lot of color in the water.  Dark colored jigs and plastics were going to be the order for the day.  Learning how to fish jerkbaits and swimbaits could wait until the water cleared up.  It was my first trip of the year, and I did not want to start 2016 with a skunk.

About two and a half hours went by before I made my way around a point and started casting a 3/8 oz  shaky jighead with a magnum junebug worm.  I was just dragging it on the bottom out from the point, rather than hopping it, and the movement suddenly stopped.  I felt dead weight and gave the rod a good sweep.  The fight had begun with the first fish of 2016, and it was a good one - a 17.5" spotted bass.  It was my only fish of the day, but I went home that night feeling good about the prospects of the new year.  Last winter, I struggled mightily to catch fish, but so far this winter, I have been able to grind it out and keep catching a few on most of my trips.