Bass fishing can be extremely frustrating! It never fails, when I think I know what to do to catch fish it doesn’t work. And when two days in a row are completely different because you are on two different lakes it gets crazy.

Last Friday I left at 4:00 PM to go to Lake Demopolis in west Alabama to do an article for Alabama Outdoor News magazine. The 200 mile drive was supposed to take about four hours so I went on Friday since I had a tournament at Oconee on Sunday and didn’t think I could drive eight hours and fish several hours on Saturday.

When I was about 30 miles this side of Montgomery on I-85 I passed one of those trailer signs that said “Wreck Ahead – Slow Down.” I knew it must have been bad if they had time to get a sign beside the road.

Sure enough, about two miles later I came to a stop. Traffic was backed up as far as I could see. To make things worse, I was low on gas and had been planning on stopping at the next exit to fill up.

An hour later I got to that exit, one mile from where I had stopped. And it looked like half the people on the interstate had the same idea as me. It took me another full hour to get off the interstate, get gas and get back on the interstate. The gas station was so crowded half that time was just trying to get out of the parking lot!

Back on the interstate I never saw any sign of a wreck. And I got to Demopolis in six hours, not four, so I didn’t get as much sleep as I had hoped.

I fished with local angler Corey Smith and he knows Demopolis well. This lake is really a river with a dam on each end. The downstream dam is just past where the Black Warrior and Tombigbee Rivers join. You can go up either river more than 50 miles.

We caught about 15 bass and two of them were nice. Corey caught a three pounder on a spinnerbait and a five pounder on a swim jig. I caught several bass on a jig and pig.

Fortunately, the drive home that afternoon was uneventful and took only four hours. I got up at 3:00 Sunday morning and headed to Oconee, confident I could catch some bass.

At blast off Jordan and I headed to a lighted dock where I had caught two keepers two weeks before in the Sportsman Club tournament. All we caught there was a short bass. Bass at Oconee have to be 14 inches long to keep and weigh in.

We spent eight hours fishing every kind of cover and structure I could think of to catch a fish. All we caught were fish under the size limit. I did have one that looked like a keeper when it jumped threw my jig head worm. It was a very frustrating day.

In the Flint River Tournament nine people fished eight hour to land six keeper bass weighing about 11 pounds. There were no limits, two people had two each and two people had one each, and five of us did not catch a keeper.

Chuck Croft won it all, first place and big fish, with one weighing 3.27 pounds. Niles Murray came in second with two weighing 3.05 pounds, Phil King was third with two at 3.03 pounds and Dan Phillips came in fourth with one at 1.89 pounds. That was it. Nobody else had a keeper.

Thank goodness fishing will get better around here soon. Highs are supposed to be in the 70s and low 80s this week, so lakes will start cooling and bass will start their fall feeding spree.

I am back on Oconee today with Cody Stahl, a local high school fisherman, doing an article for Georgia Outdoor News. I hope he can show me how to catch a bass there!