Last Saturday and Sunday, 13 members of the Spalding County Sportsman Club and one youth competitor fished our Clarks Hill April tournament. We weighed in 84 keeper bass weighing about 129 pounds. There were eight five-fish limits and no one zeroed.

Wayne Teal won with ten weighing 18.98 pounds and had big fish with a 4.18 pound largemouth, George Roberts was second with ten at 16.47 pounds, Raymond English placed third with ten at 14.47 pounds and Kwong Yu was fourth with eight weighing 12.94 pounds. Cooper Terry won the Youth Division with three weighing 6.02 pounds and had big fish with a largemouth weighing 3.06 pounds.

This has been a very frustrating spring for me and this tournament added to it. I fished Thursday and Friday trying to figure something out, and caught one bass, a big crappie and a gar in two days. I thought some fish would be in the shallow flooded grass where I caught some quality bass a month ago but could not get a bite around it.

That grass was rotting, and I decided it was using up the water oxygen and keeping the fish out of the shallows. I never saw even a bream swimming in it. So I tried to find fish on other cover. I definitely outsmarted myself since the tournament was won in that grass.

Saturday morning I went to a rocky point where I can usually catch some bass this time of year, but did not get a bite in the first hour. Back in a cove I did miss one fish on a weightless Trick worm and caught a small keeper and that should have told me something, but those were the only two bites, and they were both small, so that added to my thoughts of no oxygen in them.

On a rocky hump I caught a decent keeper but that was the only one there, a place where bass should be schooling up. I tried another shallow cove and as I went around it I saw some brush out in 20 feet of water on my 360 scan depthfinder. A cast to it produced a three pounder so that made me fish deeper for several hours, but not more bites.

In desperation I went back shallow and caught my fourth keeper on a whacky rigged worm under a dock, but that was my last bite for the day. My four that day put me in third place so I had some hope for Sunday.

Sunday morning, I got no bites on the rocky hump where I started, and nothing in the brush or around the docks. I decided to make a major change and ran to a bridge, but no bites there, either.

I thought about fishing a nearby point where I had caught fish before, but almost left without going to it. As I fished around it two rental jon boats rounded it, full of kids banging paddles against the side of the aluminum boat. Again I almost left, but a cast right behind those boats as they left produced a keeper.

I caught my second one a little later on that point, but that was it. I dropped to sixth place with my two little keepers.