Last Saturday I spent the afternoon on Batletts Ferry Lake just north of Columbus with Tyler Morgan. Tyler is a young tournament fisherman from Columbus and is very good. In the past few years while fishing 33 FLW tournaments like the BFLs as a boater and non-boater, he has finished in the top ten 16 times, an incredible record.

Tyler was showing me how and where he fishes the lake, marking ten good spots for April fishing for the Georgia and Alabama Outdoor News Map of the Month articles. Bigger fish had been up in shallow water getting ready to spawn due to the unusually warm weather, but the cold fronts pushed them back out.

There were still a lot of smaller male bass feeding shallow, waiting on the weather to warm and bring the females in to them. They will start fanning beds to invite the females as soon as conditions are right. We caught 15 to 20 bass but the biggest was about 2.5 pounds.

Tyler impressed me with how he fishes. He covers a lot of water fast, running backs of coves with baits that will draw a strike from hungry bass. He could skip a frog or swim jig far back into cover like overhanging bushes and tree tops, places most fishermen, and I, never get a bait into.

He kept his trolling motor on a fast speed and went down the bank too fast for me to fish a slower moving bait like a jig and pig or shaky head. That is the way I fish. At my age I have to sit down, make a cast and slowly work the bait back out. None of that for him, although I did catch four or five bass that he accidently left for me.