I grew up reading the big three outdoor magazines of the time: Outdoor Life, Sports Afield and Field and Stream.  At one time I had every copy of all three from 1964 until about 2000.  Those magazines made me want to catch salmon in an Alaska stream and shoot doves in Argentina.

Sometimes an article applied directly to this country Georgia boy. I distinctly remember a tip that redwing blackbirds often lit in bushes hanging over the water and watched a bass under them, expecting the bass to injure a minnow the bird could than eat.

A few days later while fishing Harrison’s Pond with my trusty Mitchell 300 and a Devil’s Horse, I saw a redwing blackbird sitting on a small bush growing from the top of a stump about 40 feet off the bank.  It took me a couple of cast to place the Devil’s Horse perfectly and bring it by the stump, but I got an explosive strike from a nice two-pound bass.

More recently I had gotten my fishing stuff ready for a Jackson night tournament and was killing time waiting to leave. I read an online report on an Arkansas lake.  It said the bass were hitting a jig and pig at night.

I went out and tied one on for the tournament.  At midnight I had not caught a fish and had just two hours left to fish.  Remembering the article and jig, I picked it up and started casting it to a rocky point. I landed five bass on it in the next hour and won the tournament.

The big three magazines were national and covered everything about the outdoors. Then around my senior year in high school, 1968, I heard about a new group that published a magazine. But it was different. The Bass Anglers Sportsman Society (BASS) was nothing but black bass fishing.

Youth nowadays have almost unlimited information available to them and many of them take advantage of it. Some college bass fishermen have more bass fishing knowledge than I have accumulated in 65 years of bass fishing.  They constantly study and read about bass fishing.

I share recaps of my tournament here and hope they help fishermen catch fish.  Sometimes another fisherman sharing what they catch fish on and how they are caught is a big help. For the same reason I post a variety of fishing reports on my web site. You never know where or when a tip may help you in the future.

I hope somehow my reports help you catch a bass!

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I wish I had read something or heard something to help me at West Point last weekend!  That lake has been my bane this year in tournaments, finishing near the bottom in Potato Creek and a Sportsman Club tournaments in February.

Last Sunday 12 members and guests fished from 6:30 AM to 3:00 PM to land 40 bass weighing about 40 pounds at West Point. There were four five-bass limits and one person didn’t weigh in a fish.

Raymond English won with five weighing 10.31 pounds and got big fish with a 2.59 pounder. Second went to Billy Roberts with five at 6.33 pounds, third was Lee Hancock with five at 5.30 pounds and Jay Gerson was fourth with five weighing 4.97 pounds. My four weighing 4.69 pounds was fifth, one place out of the money again!

Before the tournament Lee said a big tournament there the day before produced a winning weight of 18 pounds.  He asked “How do they do that?”  I told him I thought they ran way up the river and threw topwater frogs around grass and other shallow cover, working hard all day for five bites from quality largemouth. I also said I could not fish like that anymore, my old body won’t let me.

Instead I tend to fish memories, trying to catch fish in the same places and the same ways I caught them the same time of year in the past.  Sometimes it kinda works.

After a club member helped me launch my boat and I sat waiting on blastoff Sunday morning, the fairly strong wind make me change my plans.  I knew the wind would be blowing right into three rocky points down the lake where I caught fish two weeks ago, usually a good thing. I decided to start there rather than a place upstream I originally planned to go.

Wind was blowing into the points and a crow walking the edge of the water, looking for shad I thought, made me think I had made a good decision. I quickly missed a bite on topwater and picked up a Carolina rig and landed a 11.9-inch spot. Not a keeper.

And it was the only bite I got until I ran back up the lake to where I planned to start at 9:00. I finally caught three fish on a shaky head worm on rocky points and one on a whacky rigged worm under a dock.

I hooked exactly five bass all day!  I just could not catch that fifth keeper.