Last Sunday, March 6, nine members of the Flint River Bass Club fished our March tournament at Lake Sinclair.  The weather was beautiful for our casting from 7:00 AM to 3:00 PM but the bass didn’t seem to care.  We weighed in 29 keeper bass weighing about 47 pounds and had three five-bass limits. No one zeroed.

    My four at 10.63 won and I had as 4.19 pound largemouth for big fish. Chuck Croft placed second with five at 9.15 pounds, Don Gober had five at 9.02 pounds for third and Alex Gober, his grandson fishing with him, had five at 4.86 pounds for fourth.

    Will Mclean fished with me and we headed to some grass beds near the dam where Ricky Layton, showing me around the same time of year two years ago for a GON article, caught five weighing 28 pounds.  But after three hours and several different places, we both had two bites.

    A good keeper bass hit my crankbait on a seawall and jumped and threw it. Then Will hooked and lost what looked like a keeper on a Texas rigged Senko.  A little later Will caught a bass that just barely touched the 12-inch line, then I caught a similar one.

Club rules say a bass must be 12 inches long with its mouth closed on a keeper board to be weighed.  I could make mine touch the 12-inch line, barely, but worried about it. Sometimes in the excitement of catching one I do not measure it correctly.

Around 10:30 I cast my bladed jig to a grassbed on a point and hooked a keeper out in front of it. At 11:30 Will cast to the middle of a shallow cove, said “I got one” and a huge fish swirled on top. He got it to the boat and I netted it, but it was a big blue catfish. Will’s new scales said it weighed ten pounds but it looked much bigger.

At 2:00, with about 45 minutes left to fish I was pretty disgusted. We went into one of my favorite small creeks. As we fished down a bank with a big grassbed on it, I told Will I had never caught a fish past the last small dock on it, it was very shallow. But Niles Murray caught a keeper back in it when we fished together a few years ago.

I cast my bladed jig back in it and my line started going sideways. When I set the hook the 4.19 pounder jumped, it was only a foot deep and it had nowhere to go but up!  When I got it to the boat I let it go around the trolling motor but managed to pull the motor and bass up and Will got it in the net by lying down on the deck and reaching forward. That fish was just meant to get caught.

I caught another keeper on a shaky head on the next dock, then started around the other arm of the cove. Again I told Will I had never caught a bass way back in it, and he reminded me of what had just happened.

As luck would have it, way back in it I pitched my shaky head to a seawall about a foot of water and felt a tap and my line started moving out. When I set the hook a 4.13 pound largemouth fought hard but I managed to keep it away from the trolling motor and Will netted it.

We went back to the dock where I caught my keeper and Will got a 3.16 pounder off the seawall beside it, again about a foot deep. That was it, we had to go in.

I don’t know if it was time of day, location or what but I wish it had started earlier, or we had more time to fish before the time ended. This time of year fishing is often better late in the day after the sun warms the water some. It was 62 degrees in that creek at 2:00 and I am sure those fish were thinking about bedding.

While waiting for Will to back the trailer in, I checked my smallest fish and decide it had shrunk, so I just weighed in four.