After fishing area lakes in two bass clubs for about 40 years, I often think I know them pretty well. But when I go to a lake with a guide who fishes one lake over 200 days every year, and has been doing that for 15 years, it amazes me how they know ever little detail of what is under the water.
Wednesday I fished West Point Lake with Ken Bearden, getting information for a Georgia Outdoor News January article. After some boat problems first thing that morning we got on the water at about ten. We tried several patterns and caught a few fish on one of them by noon so, for the next six hours, we fished that specific pattern from Yellowjacket Creek to the dam.
That morning while waiting on a friend to bring us a boat to borrow for the day to replace Ken’s disabled one, he explained there are three good patterns at West Point in the winter. One is jigging a spoon in deep water. One is swimming a bucktail through standing timber in deep water. And the third, the one we relied on, was fishing a crankbait on rocky points.
Ken told me you could catch large numbers of fish quickly on the first two patterns, but the third was a matter of run and gun, hitting as many points as possible. He didn’t expect to catch more than one or two bass on each spot, and many would not have any fish, but if you hit enough places you could get a good limit.
It worked. Ken landed six largemouth weighing between two and four pounds each and three spots weighing about 2.5 pounds each. The best five weighed about 14 pounds. I would love to have those fish in any tournament.
We also caught several striped bass and hybrids that morning casting an Alabama rig on roadbeds. They fought hard and the biggest weighed just under ten pounds. He said we could fish roadbeds and catch them like that all day right now.
We put ten places on a map, with GPS coordinates and details on how to fish them. That information will be in the magazine article. You can set up a guide trip with Ken by calling 706-884-0494 to get him to show you how well he knows the lake and how he fishes it.