When the crashing thunder woke me Thursday night I smiled – thinking how glad I was to be at home and not on the lake. Lightning thunder and fishing do not go together for me! While I was growing up lightning terrified me no matter where I was. That came from spending the night on our screened in porch when I was about eight years old during a huge thunderstorm.

After that night lightning and thunder scared me. As I got older I learned that I could be safe, even outside, but I still will not be out in open water when a thunderstorm is near.

I was supposed to go to the Alabama River near Montgomery for an Alabama Outdoor News article early Thursday morning. On Wednesday night I talked with the fisherman taking me and we agreed to postpone it till this week due to the weather. Both of us agreed we don’t mind rain but do not want to be on the water during a light show!

That was the right decision. There was a BASS Open tournament on Smith Lake north of Birmingham starting Thursday. BASS sent out a text at 4:00 AM Thursday morning to the 350 fishermen entered in it that the first tournament day was canceled and it would be a two day rather than a three day tournament. They don’t do that except in dangerous circumstances.

Over the 42 years I have had a bass boat I have spent some scary hours in one on lakes during a thunderstorm. One of the first was in the early 1970s in late June on Bartletts Ferry just north of Columbus. Bob Pierce and I had gone down and camped before a tournament to practice.

Back then we always put in at the dam. Bob and I decided to run way up the Chattahoochee River one day. It is still dangerous but now there are channel markers to keep you off the mud flats. There were none back then.

We slowly worked our way up the river in my 1974 Arrowglass bass boat with a 70 HP motor, finding our way around the dangerous shallows. About 3:00 PM, without warning, lightning started popping all around us. We had not heard anything up until that time so did not have time to try to get back down the river. It was raining too hard to see even if the lightning had not bothered us.

I eased into a small creek where I felt safe with big overhanging trees on the bank, thinking if lightning hit one of the trees we would be ok in the boat. I had to keep using the trolling motor to hold us in the creek. The wind kept trying to blow us back out onto the river and open water.

After about an hour of this I realized the boat was no longer moving. It was so full of water it was sitting on the bottom, with the motor stuck in the mud. I turned on the bilge pump and it ran constantly for the next three hours.

As it started getting dark at about 8:00 the storm broke and we managed to get back to the campground. That was a miserable afternoon of sitting and not fishing.

A few years later on a hot August afternoon I went to Jackson to practice for a night tournament the following weekend. I had been fishing up Tussahaw Creek and catching a few fish but as it got dark I rode to the dam, in the same Arrowglass boat, and started fishing near it.

Again, suddenly and without any warning, the wind started howling over the dam and lightning started cracking around me. It was one of those storms so close you hear a crack, boom and thunder so close to gather it is almost one sound.

Back then there was no drum line keeping boats away from the dam. I pulled my boat right in the corner of it where it hit he rocks and put my trolling motor down between two rocks to hold me in place. The dam rose about 20 feet over me and had a metal railing that I thought would work as a lightning rod.

When I looked up the rain blew over the top of the dam sideways the wind was so strong. I sat down in the drivers seat and put my head on my arms on the steering wheel. I could still see the flashes of lightning. It was so bad my dog Merlin crawled under the console to hide.

After sitting like that for two hours the storm passed and I ran to Kersey’s, put the boat on the trailer and came home!

In a Top Six tournament at Lanier in the early 1990s I was in the first group of boats to go out. There were 91 boats in my flight and all were sitting in a group out from the ramp at Laurel Park waiting on the signal to start taking off.

We heard some thunder off in the distance then suddenly it was right on top of us. I told my partner I was not going to sit in open water and we idled over and got under a dock. The other 90 boats sat there and ignored the lightning.

I was boat number 89 of the 91 and when the others were let go the storm had moved on. I waited a few minutes then took off. Fortunately that was the last storm of the day!

We have lots of thunderstorms this time of year. Be safe, stay out of open water when fishing if one is near!

Rain, rain, go away, come again another day. We used to say that when it rained on weekends, messing up our plans. A few years ago we were happy with rain any day since it was so dry. But this winter has been almost ridiculous with all the rain.

Although I live at one of the highest points in my area, as a Pike County water tank a few hundred feet behind my house proves, my back yard still looks like a rice paddy. There is what we called a swale growing up – a shallow dip – that drains the whole hill side through my back yard. The ditch in front of my house has been full of water for months.

Area lakes that were low for years are now full to overflowing. Georgia Power and the Corps of Engineers are no longer trying to hold water back to keep lakes filled. Instead they are holding water back in some lakes to avoid flooding downstream – them main purpose of our federal dams – and releasing water as fast as they can when it is possible.

For fishing, rain can be a blessing or a curse. Rain and fishing go together it seems. It ruined two trips for me in the past few months. Last November I went to Lay Lake to do an article with BASS Pro Matt Herren. He had said we should be able to catch a bunch of three to five pound spotted bass in the Coosa River at the upper end of Lay, just below the Neely Henry dam.

When I got over there we checked the Neely Henry dam and all the flood gates were open, the current in the river was very strong and fast, and the water was high. Mat said that made it unfishable. So we went down the lake where the current was a little lighter and caught some small keeper bass.

Last Wednesday I went to Mitchell Lake on the Coosa River just north of Montgomery. On the way over there at 6:00 AM I hit heavy rain, wind and lightning just across the state line on I-85. The rain was so bad that some crazy drivers had their emergency flashers on and were driving 20 miles per hour on the interstate. If it is that bad to them they need to get off the road!

By the time I got to the lake the rain had ended and it didn’t rain on us the rest of the day. I met Dustin Connell, a young professional fisherman and guide, there. He said he was worried. He expected to catch some big spotted bass up the river, below the Lay Lake dam, but the heavy rain might have caused a problem.

Sure enough when we started up the river we hit a bunch of floating trash and the water got muddier and muddier. By the time we got to the good places to fish conditions were terrible. We went back down the river to a place just ahead of the mud and trash, and Dustin quickly caught a 3.5 pound spot.

Last Monday Dustin had caught a six pound largemouth and a four pound spot and lost another largemouth he estimated at seven pounds in some grass beds in a creek. When we got to the area the rain had muddied up the creek making fishing tough.

Rain helps fishing since fish tend to bite better when it is cloudy, and during hot weather it cools the water some. And water running into a lake can wash food into the water, turning on the bass and making them feed. You can often fish faster and catch a lot of bass after a rain.

It really doesn’t matter since we have no control over the weather, we just have to adapt and go when we can!