August is not a great month for bass fishing, but if you know what you are doing you can catch them. It is hot and uncomfortable for the fishermen and the bass are on very specific patterns.  If you don’t fish a lake a lot and keep up with the fish, it is hard to do well.

The Flint River Bass Club has scheduled a two-day tournament at Clarks Hill each August for the past seven or eight years, and we just don’t learn from our mistakes.  For a couple of years we caught some nice bass fishing a top water frog over the hydrilla that was widespread on the lake.

A few years ago the Corps of Engineers started a program to eradicate the hydrilla.  Coots were eating it and bald eagles ate the coots. The problem was the hydrilla had some kind of bacteria in it that was concentrated by the coots. Eagles eating them died from it. Over a ten-year period, 78 eagles were found on the lake that died from the bacteria.

After two years of spraying and putting 80,000 grass carp in the lake, the hydrilla is pretty much gone.  I am not sure what will happen to the carp, they probably will starve since their food source is gone. It is not unusual to see a 30-inch-long grass carp cruising the shallows looking for something to eat.

Without the hydrilla to keep bass shallow in the hot water, they hold in deep water and eat blueback herring. Folks over there put out cane piles, bundles of cane that stands up off the bottom.  If you can find a cane pile you often can catch bass by working a topwater plug over it.

Last year only two of us showed up for the Flint River tournament, this year three.  And two years ago nobody showed up. Last year Chuck and I fished until noon on Saturday, agreeing to go home rather than fish the second day.

This year three of us fished from 6:00 AM to 2:00 PM Saturday then agreed we had enough of the hot sun and did not fish on Sunday.  John Smith had three keepers weighing 3.39 pounds and won. My two weighing 3.02 pounds was second and my 1.76 pound largemouth was big fish. That was it!

The same time we fished there was a local Saturday Morning Open Tournament (SMOT). It produced a winning weight of five bass weighing about 13.5 pounds and second place was five at 13.2 pounds.

D.J. Hadden won the SMOT.  I did an article with him there a few years ago and another one with his son a year later.  Both showed me how they pull up on a hump or point with a brush pile on it, line up their cast and work a topwater walking bait over it.  You must know where the brush piles are and which ones are holding bass to fish effectively.  I am sure that is how the tournament was won.

I went over to my place at Raysville Boat Club Wednesday and got on the water for a few hours Thursday. The heat ran me back to my air conditioning after about four hours of looking around. 

I thought there might be some bass hanging around the bream beds in shallow water and caught one small bass. I saw plenty of bream, just no bass.  I also found a lot of fish holding on drops and old brush piles in 18 to 20 feet of water but could not get them to hit.

Friday was even hotter and I spent only three hours marking some deep brush to fish before heading in.

Saturday morning I headed to a nearby bridge and fished a topwater plug around it, catching both my keepers and a throwback before 8:00.  After that I never landed another bass no matter what I tried so I was not unhappy when we decided to not fish the second day

I spent Sunday napping at Clarks Hill with the air conditioner running!