Im a pretty good club fisherman. Over the years I have won the yearly point standings in the Sportsman Club 19 times and 18 in the Flint River club. And I have made the state team finishing in the top 12 fishermen out of over 500 at the Top Six tournament, the club championship of all clubs in the state, five times over the years. But I will never be as good as the top level fishermen, or even those guys that do well at the state level.
I love fishing and writing about fishing. The articles I write in GON and AON and Georgia sportsman are really like research reports I wrote getting masters degrees and a doctorate. I do research, going out with other fishermen, and report what they say. The research part is the fun part, the sitting at a computer for three hours writing it is not the fun part
The research can get hectic tho. I often drive four or five hours to the lake, go out in the boat for four to eight hours, then drive home. Makes for a long day!
The longest day I ever had was several years ago. I was doing an article with Karen Elkins on Neeley Henry Lake in Alabama. I made the mistake of telling her I could get her picture on the cover of the magazine if we could catch a five pound bass for pictures.
I drove four hours to meet her at 6 am. We went out and stayed on the water until 9 PM that night – 15 hours! And then I drove 4 hours home, arriving 23 hours after I left. And the biggest bass we caught was about two pounds!
I also write my column in the Griffin daily News each week and every other month in Kitchen drawer. And I do a web site on fishing. In those I sometimes try to write creatively but Im not sure how successful I am. But I write about anything that I want in them. Some of my favorites are about growing up wild in Georgia – my memories of the 1950s and 60s – a very different time.
In 2001 I wrote “The Everything Fishing Book” for Adams Media. An agent contacted me and asked if I would be interested. I had just retired from my day job and it seemed like a good idea at the time. When I found out the details I almost backed out. They wanted a very specific book, kinda a “fishing for dummies” covering all the basics. The worst thing was they gave me four months to write 85,000 words! I did manage to get it done and I think it sold a few thousand copies.
I have also put some of my Map of the Month articles into book format. For both Clarks Hill and Lanier I put together an article for each month of the year. It is in eBook format and I also sell it on CD and email it in Microsoft word format. Some fishermen have found it useful.
Those articles do help. I have won a good many tournaments following the old articles. One of the best was at Allatoona. I don’t fish that lake much, I had been on it only three times, all for articles, when the flint River Club scheduled a September tournament there. So I pulled out those articles, printed out the one for September and took it with me.
The article was with David Millsaps, one of the best fishermen on Allatoona and in Georgia. The article said start by going around a certain small creek up the Little River, fishing a jig and pig, so I took off at the start of the tournament and ran to it.
After going around the creek and catching two keepers I fished the upstream rocky point of it with the jig and pig with no bites. That was hole number 2. I pulled in the trolling motor, cranked the big motor and pulled out the article to check where hole three was. I noticed the last line on hole two said throw a big crankbait across the rocky point before leaving.
I turned off the motor, picked up a rod with a big fat free shad on it and the first cast caught a 3.5 pound spot. That fish turned out to be big fish in the tournament. And on hole three and four I got a keeper on each one, filling out my limit. I had five weighing 11 pounds that day – second place was five pounds! So the article works.
My wife says I can remember every bass I have ever caught, and I used to be able to. I still remember most. I may not remember her birthday or our anniversary some years but I do remember bass!
Its funny. I have been the secretary of both bass clubs pretty much since I joined, and I have all the old tournament results. A lot of times someone will talk about a tournament from years ago and how they weighed in a limit of fish weighing 18 pounds or in a tournament they had a nine pounder. But when I look back at the actual results, they had ten pounds. Or the big fish they caught was actually five pounds, not nine. Fishermen don’t lie, but our memories surely do grow! I have always heard a fish gets bigger the longer it has been since you caught it and that seems true.
Sometimes lucky bounces happen at tournaments even if they don’t seem lucky at first. Last weekend the Flint River club fished Clark Hill for our August tournament – which Niles won, by the way. I went over on Wednesday to practice two days before the two day tournament.
At 1:30 Thursday – On my birthday of all things – I was about five miles from the ramp and ran out of gas. No problem, my boat has two 25 gallon tanks and I knew I had at least ten gallons in the other tank. But for some reason I could not get the motor to pick up gas from that tank. It took me over two hours go get back to the ramp with my trolling motor in the hot sun.
But going in I saw the symbol for an old underwater house foundation on my GPS – something I would not have noticed if riding faster with the gas motor. Friday afternoon I rode over it with my depthfinder, saw fish on it and caught a two pounder. During the tournament my partner and I caught our three biggest bass from that foundation.
Another lucky bounce!
You have to take advantage of all your bounces! When life gives you lemons, make lemonade – or Margaritas if you prefer