It Was A Cold One!

Tom’s bass club is having an open tournament next Saturday out at Bumpus Mills so Tom and I wanted to get a little “pre-fishing” in to see where the bass are, how and what they’re biting, and I also wanted to check out my new HDS-9 Touch fish finder while we were out there.

Locked and loaded, ready to roll with the heater going full blast…it was 34 degrees out and the wind was blowing.

The only real scenery pictures I took today but as you can see, it turned out to be a beautiful day, once it warmed up a little.  For the first hour or so, it was so cold that I had to put my hands in my pockets for a while  and hold on to those hand warmers after every few casts but once the winds died down and the sun really broke out of the clouds, it got comfortable enough to do some fishing.

Some action shots of one of Tom’s bass.  The water in the main river was pretty clear today which was a surprise because we had gotten a ton of rain a few days ago.

I wanted in on some action shots too but unfortunately, the above is a drum

The fish that were pic-worthy.  If I remember right, Tom caught all his bass on a Spintrix, which is a variation of the Basstrix minnow and I caught mine on a watermelon-colored Bitsy Bug Jig (I also had a few good bites on a Senko which I missed, and I lost what felt like a decent fish on a rattle trap – how a bass gets unhooked on a lure that has 2 treble hooks is beyond me because those hooks get stuck on anything and everything in the boat).

What was really cool was firing up my HDS-9 Touch and doing a split screen between sonar and side imaging.  As we were going down a channel, the side imaging showed schools of baitfish and then larger fish on the edges, and I could look at the sonar and see that the yellow globs which I had no idea what they were before, were the baitfish, and then I could see the arches which represented the bigger fish on the edge of the baitfish school.

Even though it was pretty miserable out for the first 1-2 hours, it turned out to be a pretty decent day after all.  We ran up and down the river, scouting various areas and I think we have a pretty good plan for the tournament next week.  But the bass may have different plans than we do LOL.