Tips for Fishing in the River: Our Fishing Trip
Waking up to find out that Saturday morning was just the beginning of a 4 foot rise over the next 24 hours was not the ideal start to the weekend. As I launched my boat Saturday morning, I was hoping to beat the mud from coming down river from way up north. When I realized the mud had already taken over where I was fishing, I immediately adjusted and ran into the creek in search of clean water. When I got into the creek, it just looked right with a very distinct mud line being at the mouth of the creek and the water being slow and clear in the creek. I proceeded to pull out a Strike King KVD Strobe Shad Jerkbait. I never threw it before but I figured it looked good with the overcast due to the chartreuse underside. They were all over it! As fast as I could twitch that jerk bait the fish were eating it. We also caught them on the Jackall Squad Minnow in Ghost Minnow and Super Shad.
The main bait that the fish were dialed in on was crayfish. This was the tube bite of a lifetime! They wanted that dirty dark green pumpkin Cabin Creek 2.5 inch tube! Once it hit the bottom you had to let it sit there for a few seconds and they would just start swimming off with it. I must say, I put the new G Loomis GLX 803 spinning rod to the test, and I am super impressed with this rod. It certainly did not let me down. One thing that we did to get the fish to hold onto the tube longer was we did use Smelly Jelly. We relied on Garlic, Crawfish, and Crawfish Anise to increase the length of time the fish had the tube in its mouth. All in all, we ended up catching over 100 fish on this day.
After fishing all day Saturday and watching the river rise, I already knew my game plan for Sunday. Sunday was going to be a day of relaxation and fun fishing on the river with my buddies Hunter Moffitt and Ben Cluster. The river was at 9 foot in the morning and all of the creeks were clean water. The smallmouth and largemouth were sitting right on the mud line, and also on any main river log jams that you could find that created slack water behind them. By the end of the day, we caught some giant fish and ran over 35 miles as tracked by the Anglr App.
We relied on several baits to have success on this particular day. First was a Spro McRip. I have not talked about this bait all year long, however today is the day. The reason that I went to this bait was because the high water from the main river raised the creeks several feet. A typical jerk bait would not get deep enough to get into the ideal strike zone. The Spro McRip was getting down 8-10 feet where the fish were. In clean water I used the Spooky Shad and in dirty water I used the Norman Flake.
The go to bait of the day was a square bill crank bait like the Megabass S-Crank and the Strike King KVD 2.5 in Black Back Chartreuse and Gold Sexy Shad. You just had to keep covering water and beating the banks near hard cover to catch these fish. We used this in the dirty water mainly and the jerk bait in the cleaner water. We also pitched targets such as wood, and flooded bushes with a D and L Finesse Jig (black and blue) with a Strike King Baby Rage Craw (Black and Blue). One big fish was caught on a Missile Baby D-Bomb on a War Eagle 3/16 oz Shaky Head.
