April 17, FLW Day One – Beaver Lake, AR
Dan writes:
It was a boat race this morning. When they called my number I took off and headed for the dam. So did everyone else; I didn’t see a single boat turn right and head upriver. In fact very few boats even pulled off in the usual places heading down. Seems like everyone wants to find that clear water.
The YAMAHA ran great – this was its first real test, the first time I’ve run it flat out for more than a few minutes at a time. Not a single boat passed me, and I passed a few myself during the twenty mile run.
I had decided to run almost all the way down to the dam, to an area of three little pockets with a number of bedding fish in each. I figured I had a better chance of finding at least one of them open to me doing it this way. As it worked out, I was able to pull into a pocket which had one boat already there, but that boat was working a bed on the other side and I was able to slide into position on one of my “big red X’s” from the other day. It was a fallen cedar tree which had two big fish on a bed underneath on Monday. As I eased in for a look, I could see that one of them, a three pounder, was still there now.
The trouble with this bed though is the tree. It is very difficult to get a bait into the bed, and almost impossible to do it without hanging your line over one of the branches. On the other hand the tree offers the fish some sense of protection, which allows me to position the boat closer.
I worked this fish for fifteen minutes or so before making her bite. I was fishing the drop-shot rig at the time. When I jerked, I stuck her good. The fight went on for perhaps thirty seconds, but it all took place right there on the bed. With my ten-pound test line, I was not able to move her out of there. The line was wrapped on at least one underwater cedar limb, and as the fight progressed the fish managed to eliminate me all together. She was soon fighting just the tree, and we tried to get in there with the net before it was too late, but we didn’t make it. She finally shook the hook out and raced away to safety.
That was my excitement for the day. After that I wasted time catching a fourteen-inch largemouth, and then I went to every one of my other marked beds. They were either already empty, or had a boat sitting on top of them.
The big disappointment of the day was that there were no new fish up. Sunday is when they started to come up, and Monday was when they made the big move. I went to places Monday afternoon that were barren just the day before, but when I returned I found three or four beds with fish on them. I figured that that was just the start that they’d keep on coming after that. The surprise today was that I never found any new beds, nothing that was not there on Monday. And unfortunately, with all of the boats that are sight fishing today, there are not enough of these to go around.
This afternoon I spent a couple of hours flipping the big jig into trash pockets, but as I guessed was going to happen the falling water level moved all of the fish out of these places. I spent some time crank-baiting a “can’t miss” spot that a fellow fisherman told me about, and I even took my partner to his fish for the last half hour, but both of us ended up zeroing for the day.