Rob got these two nice spots when I fished with him.
Rob paints lures, too. His custom painted baits look great and that is what we caught fish on. It takes real skill with an airbrush to make a plug come alive like he does. He had a great teacher, his cousin Jim Murray, Jr., a professional bass fisherman from south Georgia that also has a custom lure painting business.
Lanier can be a tough lake to fish. The big spots there live out in open, deep water. It is not unusual to be sitting in 80 feet of water in your boat and casting to a hump 30 feet deep. But that is where you catch the big ones. They are fat and healthy from eating blueback herring.
Rob said he had about 1400 brush piles marked on his GPS. Many fishermen put out the brush piles on humps and points 20 to 30 feet deep to draw the spotted bass in. That is where they feed, and locating them is the best way to catch fish.
We put in at Van Pugh park near the dam and fished in a big circle up to Brown’s Bridge then back down the other side of the lake, marking spots and catching bass. Rob assures me September is a good month to fish the lake. I hope so. The Flint River Bass Club has a tournament scheduled there early in September.
You can see and order his baits at extremelurecreations.com and contact Rob for a guide trip at 770-873-7135.
I get to fish with some really good bass fishermen doing magazine articles. In the past few years I have fished with five of the 41 pros that were in the 2012 Bassmasters Classic, and have fished with some of the top pros in the FLW tournaments, too. And I go out with many local fishermen that do well in smaller tournaments.
I love tournament fishing and am always amazed at how many more bass, and bigger bass, they can catch than I can. And they fish the same way I do, with the same baits. It is either magic or they have some sixth sense for finding and catching bigger bass. What ever it is I wish I had it!
Someday maybe I will learn how to catch bigger bass while fishing with the pros.