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.