A few years ago a friend fishing with me caught a small bass and said “Now we know the pattern to fish today.” I just laughed. I am no professional fisherman, but I do not think one fish sets a pattern.
Bass fishermen search for a pattern each day, the kinds of structure, cover and depth fish seem to be holding and feeding, and what kind of food they are eating. Discover a good pattern and you can catch fish all over a big lake doing the same thing. Pro fishermen are pros because they can usually find a good pattern.
On the other hand I work to catch every fish I can find. In my mind there are always some bass shallow and they are more likely to be feeding and easier to catch. Sometimes I find a small pattern, maybe fishing the front edge of a grass bed, the back post on a dock or a rocky seawall.
In a recent tournament a club member stated, “The bass are not in the grass beds today, I never got a bite in them.” My response was that was odd since my biggest three fish hit in grass beds. Patterns are elusive for fishermen like me!
The Sportsman Club Classic last Sunday at Bartletts Ferry proved this to me. In the tournament that 8 fishermen qualified to fish, we landed 29 bass weighing about 29 pounds. In eight hours of casting, there were three five-bass limits and no one zeroed.
Wayne Teal won big with five weighing 10.69 pounds and his 3.85 pound largemouth was big fish. Raymond English came in second with five at 5.86 pounds, my five weighing 5.49 pounds was third, Jay Gerson placed fourth with two sat 5.09 pounds and Kwong Yu came in fifth with four weighing 3.77 pounds.
Two weeks ago I fished Bartletts four days, three in practice and one in the Potato Creek Tournament. Last week I camped and fished Friday and Saturday and then the tournament Sunday.
Bartletts Ferry has many water willow grass beds and are usually a good place to find bass feeding. In the 7 days I fished I tried many of them and worked a variety of baits through them. I never got a bite.
Of course, Wayne said all his fish hit in grass beds on baits I had tried!
Finding a pattern is great and I have found a few over the years. At Guntersville a few years ago I caught four bass, three over four pounds each, by pitching a jig to the right front post of docks in less than three feet of water. My partner and I never got a bite around other posts that day!
Sometimes two fishermen can be casting the same bait to the same places but only one will catch fish. Often there is a slight difference in the way the bait is worked or some other unnoticed factor.
That is why I find it difficult to figure out a pattern. I get frustrated and think maybe the fish are there, I am just doing a little something wrong.
Once again I camped at Blanton Creek Georgia Power campground. Knowing their discriminating rule against boat owners, I reserved a site on the water. When I arrived after 4:00 PM there was a map on the board with my name on it. A sign said set up and check in the next morning.
When I went to my site the wind was blowing fairly big waves into the bank, so I set up and parked my boat on the site, completely out of the road and off the grass. An hour later the campground host drove up in a golf cart to tell me I could not park my boat on the site.
We talked for a while and he was very nice, explaining a few years ago someone with a boat caused a problem how they parked, so Georgia Power made a rule no boats in the campground. So they punished every boat owner for the past four years for the actions of one.
He let me leave my boat there for the night since it was Thursday but insisted I move it first thing the next morning.
Unfortunately, two club members that had reservations to camp but not on the water had to cancel since they could not charge their batteries.
Maybe someday Georgia power won’t punish all boat owners due to the past action of one slob.
