Club bass fishing can be a humbling experience. And in my limited experience, at higher levels it is worse. It is easy to go from hero to zero in a few days.
I grew up fishing Clarks Hill, catching my first bass from the lake in 1962 while my family was camping at “The Cliffs,” an unimproved access point on an old dirt road. My church group as well as my family camped there several times every summer. Then in 1966 our family joined the Raysville Boat Club, where I am still a member.
For years in the 1970s through the 1990s I spent most holidays fishing there, including Christmas, Thanksgiving and spring break. And, since I was a teacher and school administrator during those years, I had summers off and would spend several weeks there each summer, fishing every day.
I learned the little keys to the lake, small rock piles, drops and stump fields most people never saw. When the lake was low during the winter I looked for hidden gems that held bass, places like those as well as hidden points, ditches and humps. And I built brush piles to attract and hold the bass.
Now many of those kinds of places are easily found with modern GPS mapping, but some are still somewhat secret. But the lake has changed a lot over the years, first getting blueback herring in it that changed the feeding habits of bass. Then hydrilla spread all over the lake for a few years but it has now been killed off completely.
The biggest change is fishing pressure. For years it was unusual to see another fishing boat during the week, now even on a weekday I often have to get in line to fish a place that holds bass.
Jim Berry invited me to join the Spalding County sportsman Club in March, 1974 and we fished the club tournament in April at Clarks Hill. I got hooked on tournament fishing and I joined the Flint River Bass Club in 1978 and the Potato Creek Bassmasters in 2016.
I think the Sportsman Club has fished our April tournament at Clarks Hill every year since 1974. I often do well, a memory on Facebook showed me winning the tournament there in 2016 with ten bass weighing 24 pounds.
Way back in 1983 I came in fourth in the State Top Six Championship competing with 550 other club fishermen at West Point. Then I came in second in the Regional at Kentucky Lake, missing qualifying to fish the Bassmasters Classic by two pounds in a three-day tournament.
That made me think I was a pretty competitive fisherman, so I signed up for the six Georgia Redman “semiprofessional” tournaments the next year. After not placing in any of them, I figured it was just first year “jitters” so I signed up for all six the next year.
At the end of that second year I again had not placed in any of the tournaments. It made me feel completely incompetent. I decided maybe I was a decent club fisherman, not good enough to compete at a higher level, so I have stuck with club fishing since then.
I did make the state team four more times over the years and have done well in the clubs, winning the point standings in them multiple times. Some tournaments do not go as planned, and sometimes after one I wonder if I really know what I am doing. But that usually passes after a few days.
I am writing this at Clarks Hill on Tuesday. I have been here a week, fishing every day and fishing the Sportsman Club tournament over the weekend. Right now I feel totally incompetent and am lost about how to catch fish. None of my old places or methods have not worked.
In the Sportsman Club tournament 14 members fished nine hours on Saturday and seven on Sunday to land 106 bass weighing about 153 pounds. There were 18 five fish limits and no one zeroed.
Sam Smith won with ten bass weighing 20.53 pounds. Kwong Yu was second with ten at 18.24 pounds and had big fish with a 3.80 pound largemouth. Niles Murray placed third with ten weighing 17.18 pounds and Wayne Teal came in fourth with ten at 15.51 pounds.
I came in 11th with three bass weighing a whopping 5.23 pounds!
I was very disappointed to see almost half the bass weighed in were spotted bass. They are expanding in Clarks Hill and I am afraid this change is really going to hurt the largemouth fishing over time.
After two days of practice and catching only five bass, I felt like I needed to do something different. There is a pattern and place that has been good for about the past seven years, it is how I won in 2016 and a couple more times since then.
But so many folks know about that now I just did not want to do it. I call it combat fishing, joining many other boats in a small area and fighting to out fish and out cast them. It is just not much fun but now I wish I had tried it.
After not catching a single fish Monday and only one today from my old places, I guess combat fishing is on the schedule for this weekend in the Potato Creek tournament here!