Friday Night Experience

[waterpossum]

My partner backed out at the last moment to fish the Friday night bass tournament so I decided to go it alone and spent the tournament hours in the dark in the timber in Maze creek. At about 9:30 I saw what I thought at first to be a vehicle pull into a West bank, but after about 30 minutes the blinding light was on a path straight toward me. I then realized by the sound it was either someone gigging or bow fishing. Other than the blinding light for about an hour whoever it was did have the courtesy to stop short of me by a 100 yards and change course to the other side of the lake. I felt pretty confident at that point with 3 keepers in the boat so I redirected my attention to the fishing, but low and behold moments later a pontoon boat with a load of people was on a course from the center of the lake in my direction. They were stopped short of me when they hit a tree a hunded yards out. Luckily they were going pretty slow so no damage was done to them or their boat, but there is one less standing tree to navigate in Maze. My complete inability to wrangle fish out of brush cost me three or four other pretty good fish weighing only the three caught before the mayhem There are a lot of good fisherman in these Friday nighters and most are bringing in limits.

[Walcrabass]

Waterpossum,

So Whatcha fishin with...????? How deep in the timber. I fished on TR over the weekend and found no fish in the timber anywhere.

[Sac River Jim]

waterpossum we went down the other direction then up towards hawker area and then stopped at price branch for about an hour on the way back to the weigh in. we only weighed in 3 fish. i think you were on to something two of the top three went up the little sac arm.

[waterpossum]

Waterpossum,

So Whatcha fishin with...????? How deep in the timber. I fished on TR over the weekend and found no fish in the timber anywhere.

12" Black worm 1/4 oz weight. Fish are suspended this time of year in the timber. The bite is hard to detect especially if there is any wind. Trees with a lot of horizontal limbs are best. You may get bit 5' deep or 15' deep. If the bait can hang over a limb under water when you lift it to fall back over the limb it seems to trigger a lot of the bites. For me this is about all I feel real comfortable doing in the heat of the summer especially in the dog days of summer. Day time is better than night for me. It doesn't matter if the tree is over 40' or 15' of water and believe me you will break off a lot of fish. Weight is very important as you want the bait to fall as slow as possible. Red or teaquilla color is also good, but I don't think color is all that important. My favorite lake to do it on is Truman.

[waterpossum]

waterpossum we went down the other direction then up towards hawker area and then stopped at price branch for about an hour on the way back to the weigh in. we only weighed in 3 fish. i think you were on to something two of the top three went up the little sac arm.

You might look at my reply to Walcrabass. I went up in Price Branch yesterday There are a lot of those darn Water Turkeys in there. I only caught two dinks in there. I fished main lake back to State Park without much luck. There were a lot of fish busting behind me from time to time over extremely deep water. The lake was pretty calm right before dark and the middle of the main lake was alive with all kinds of bait fish on the surface. Maybe this years shad fry??? My hats off to the guys that can catch a big bass. I have just not been able to catch much over 2lbs.

[Walcrabass]

Waterpossum,

Looks like your account is very accurate. The places I fished this weekend at TR the fish just were not in the timber. Instead they were in 35 to 9 million feet of water and suspended......right in the middle of the Thermocline.....no matter what depth it was. I did loop some worms and Jigs through it but no luck. Glad you did better. Fishing will be much EASIER pretty soon. Everybody will be catching them on Crankbaits and EVERYONE will be happy !!!! ugh.... that has got to be the most monotonous way to catch fish ever invented. I would much rather use the worm and Jig with the Finesse and feel that is necessary to hook one. Thanks for sharing the info, we all appreciate it.

Wallyboy

[jlm7070]

Me to walcrabass

[Sac River Jim]

possum i sure enjoyed that friday night tournament series. we started the week after you guys did but we didnt get enough in to fish the fish off if you qualified for it good luck to you. our best bag during the series came outta the hawker area but we did ok around price branch one night too. On the average I'd say most my quality fish came in 23' of water off humps on craw tubes. big worms and a variation of the ned rig. Wally gave me a tutoral on the rig this spring and it works pretty darn good for me at times. We never did fish any piles to speak because i had a hard time getting my partner to do anything except parallel the bank in 8fow slow rolling a spinnerbait.

[Sac River Jim]

You might look at my reply to Walcrabass. I went up in Price Branch yesterday There are a lot of those darn Water Turkeys in there. I only caught two dinks in there. I fished main lake back to State Park without much luck. There were a lot of fish busting behind me from time to time over extremely deep water. The lake was pretty calm right before dark and the middle of the main lake was alive with all kinds of bait fish on the surface. Maybe this years shad fry??? My hats off to the guys that can catch a big bass. I have just not been able to catch much over 2lbs.

i discovered same pattern a week ago sunday up the big sac in the springfield cove area. there were tons of 11/2'' shad schooled up everywhere i looked and especially in the mouth of big coves. I was seeing schooling fish underneathe them pretty deep but ever so often a chaser would come up. I was experimenting with a spy bait and didnt have much success with it at all.

[waterpossum]

possum i sure enjoyed that friday night tournament series. we started the week after you guys did but we didnt get enough in to fish the fish off if you qualified for it good luck to you. our best bag during the series came outta the hawker area but we did ok around price branch one night too. On the average I'd say most my quality fish came in 23' of water off humps on craw tubes. big worms and a variation of the ned rig. Wally gave me a tutoral on the rig this spring and it works pretty darn good for me at times. We never did fish any piles to speak because i had a hard time getting my partner to do anything except parallel the bank in 8fow slow rolling a spinnerbait.

I have enjoyed it too. We started fishing just in time to get in the number of tournaments necessary to fish this Friday night. Normaly Sept is not one of my more favorite months to fish because of the transition associated with the start of the water cooling down. However after reading that some big fish showed up last week maybe we will get lucky and find a couple. Funny, but my partner too is really hung up on throwing that spinner bait shallow after dark. The majority of our better fish up until now have been as you described been deeper on plastics. Hope to see you on the lake sometime. I fish out of a 19' silver -black bass tracker with 90hp mercury. Unless there are some fall-winter bass tournaments I will probably go back to chasing crappie in Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri. Normally I catch a pretty good crappie out of Kansas in the fall. I had one a little over two lbs. in June over there, but did not have my camera to take a picture before I released it. The smaller fish, however are released in a skillet.