On Sunday, May 5, nine members and guests of the Flint River Bass Club fished our May tournament at Jackson Lake. After eight hours of casting, we brought 25 bass to the scales. As usual, there were only nine largemouth weighed in. There were three limits and two fishermen didn’t catch a keeper.

Niles Murray won with five weighing 9.03 pounds and Chuck Croft placed second with five at 8.29 pounds. Tom Murray, Niles’ 13-year-old nephew fishing with him, placed third with four weighing 5.61 pounds and had big fish with a pretty 2.89-pound spot. I placed fourth with five at 4.97 pounds.

I thought it would be a perfect day, with rain and thunderstorms guessed at. But, as usual, if you planned your trip on what the weather guessers said, you missed a beautiful partly cloudy day on the lake. I hoped it would rain to keep pleasure boaters off the water.

The first few places I fished were rocky banks and points where I hoped shad would be spawning, but I guess it is over, I saw no activity. And I got no bites on a crankbait or spinnerbait.

I finally caught a small keeper spot on a shaky head worm on some rocks at 8:30. That turned out to be the pattern of the day for me, small fish on a shaky head worm.

I got my second keeper on the shaky head on a rock pile out on a flat point. I kept catching short spots, ten and 11 inches long, and invited them all home for dinner. Spots have taken over Jackson and hurt the largemouth population. There is no size limit on spots, so I try to keep ten small ones for dinner each trip.

My third keeper, another small spot, came off a seawall. Don Gober and his grandson Alex were fishing the same bank and we were talking when it hit. My fourth keeper was a small largemouth that hit on some rocks, the only largemouth I caught, at about 10:00.

It got slow for the next few hours. Even the small spots quit biting. At 2:00, with an hour left to fish, I caught my fifth fish to fill my limit. It hit as the other spots, on some rocks on a point.

With 30 minutes left to fish I decided to change and ran to a brush pile near the weigh-in site. I caught may “kicker” fish, a spot weighing just over a pound, there on the shaky head worm. Maybe I should have fished more brush but that was the only bite I got around any brush I fished.