Fished Friday evening with my good friend and club member David Curtis. When we got there about 5pm, rain clouds had formed and the temperature had dropped from 104 to 95! It felt like fall, haha. Anyway we got on the water for a few minutes before being chased by a decent rain. So we retreated to the cabin for about half an hour and the rain let up.

  When we went back out it had dropped to about 88 degrees and cloudy, and there was some wonderful breeze, but it was very humid. there was literally steam coming off the lake because water temp was 94 degrees.

  We went straight to the deep brush in the creek channel in front of the house. David had a 4 and a 5 pounder on a jig before I could even get the boat in position. Then we pulled up to some more shallow brush where we saw some brim feeding activity. David immediately caught a 7.25lb in 2 feet of water! I followed up with a couple of smaller fish, all were caught on pumpkin, watermelon, or chartreuse natural jigs.
  By then it was starting to get late so we rolled over to the brush area we had found effective earlier and David threw his jig across to the opposite side of the pile from where we were.

He was swimming it through the top when his lure just stopped. One strong pull from the fish and all David could say as he strained was Big Fish! Biiiiiiiig Fish!  She immediately went straight down into the brush, and barely moved. There was no visible line movement and as I ran the boat right up on top to try to get her out the other side of the brush, we began to wonder if she was still there. This fish was so strong and heavy that when she didn’t move you thought you had hooked into a tree stump. After what seemed like forever (about a minute) we got almost directly above her and he was able to pull her up out of the pile and over toward the side of the boat. The pucker factor was high as we both expected her to make a hard run toward open water, but David kept the pressure on and as she brought her head out of the water we could see she was truly a giant. As she was using her power to shake her head, he pulled her back towards my hand. I pulled her up and we both howled. Got her to the boga grip and she weighed exactly 11.5!!! Awesome stuff.

  Needless to say after that we were pretty relaxed knowing we probably wouldn’t top that, and we didn’t. I think we caught 2 more fish that evening. We fished the full moon for about an hour with only one small fish to show for it.

  The next morning I was able to turn two fish on a buzz bait including a 6.25. David picked up another 4.25 on a chatterbait. But then the bright sun came out and that was the end of that. The bite went away pretty much completely. We were off the water about 11am.

  So we got to visit with Mr. Yates, which as you all know is always great. The cabin was first class as always. But man, what a fishery- by my count we only caught about 11 fish, but our biggest 5 were 11.5, 7.25, 6.25, 5.25, and 4.5-  a 35 pound stringer!

  I think the keys were using larger profile baits, the jig was the ticket, we also caught a couple on big worms. Don’t be afraid to move them fairly quickly,  as with water temps in the 90’s the metabolism of these fish is in high gear.

  We are really blessed to have Mr. Yates place in the club. It’s great to have landowners like this that are so dedicated to operating a true trophy class fishery, where the next cast could be a life changing experience.

Good Luck and Good Fishing!