What a difference a week makes! After my best catch ever at Sinclair two weeks ago I could not wait to go to the Spalding County Sportsman Club tournament there last Sunday. And in it, after eight hours of casting, I had exactly one bite and caught one Lake Sinclair bass!

In our tournament ten members and two youth fished from 8:00 AM till 4:00 PM on a day that started very cold but warmed up a lot. We landed 11 keepers weighing about 25 pounds. There were no limits and six fishermen didn’t land a keeper.

Sam Smith won with four bass weighing 9.87 pounds and Niles Murray came in second with two at 5.54 pounds and his 4.34 pound largemouth won big fish, beating Sam’s 4.33 pounder by one one-hundredth of a pound! Robert Proctor had one keeper weighing 3.21 pounds for third, Raymond English finished fourth with two t 2.71 pounds, my 2.15 pounder was fifth and Russell Prevatt round out the folks catching fish with one at 1.68 pounds for sixth.

Sam said he caught his fish on a spinnerbait fished beside dock post first thing that morning. Robert said he caught his on a jig head worm. Raymond and Niles fished together and said they caught their fish on Carolina rigs.

I had my good catch the weekend before on a Rapala DT 6 crawfish colored crankbait and I made hundreds of casts with it, but got only one bite. Garrett Macyszyn fished with me on the youth side and cast a variety of baits but I just could not get us where the fish were feeding.

At Dennis Station at daylight the water was in the low 40s, about ten degrees cooler than the week before. But down the lake I saw water as warm as 52 degrees, only a few degrees cooler. But the sun was bright after the cold front that came through here after the snow, and I think bluebird skies and high pressure always hurts the fishing. Bass just don’t like those conditions and don’t feed much.

The water was still very muddy but that had not stopped the bass from feeding. The day before we fished, on Saturday, I heard there was a 12 team tournament in the high winds. Only five of the teams caught fish but two of them had limits, and there were three bass weighing over six pounds each weighed in.

As the water starts warming the end of February Sinclair should produce some outstanding catches since there seems to be a lot of four to six pound bass there this year.