With my late arrival, I didn’t even have much chance to check out different ramps. Tournament eve, I compared Google Earth with Navionics and my Map app and found one of Fork’s many bridge easements near the back of a creek arm that looked like it had lots of shallow spawning areas. With predictions of a strong south wind, this arm also looked like it would be fairly protected.
I dropped a pin on it with the Map app and discovered it was only 11 minutes from my motel in Emory, and exactly the same drive in the other direction to check-in at Lake Fork Marina & Motel.
It turned out it was an area with plenty of fish, and I apparently was the only one of five kayakers who used the same launch to not get a limit.
I got the most bites on a Senko that I Texas-rigged and fished 24 inches behind a pegged, 1/4-ounce tungsten bullet sinker. Tree swings, three misses for a strike out. I finally moved up to a 4/0 hook from a 3/0, but didn’t get any more bites on it.
With just a few hours to go and no fish caught yet, I decided to stay shallow — 2 to 4 feet deep — and throw a Finesse ShadZ, a skinny Z-Man bait that looks like a minnow. The color was Pumpkin/Green Flake and it was on a chartreuse, 1/16-ounce mushroom head. Almost immediately I hooked my first largemouth of the day, and it quickly wrapped my 8-pound Seaguar AbrazX leader around a stick. That stuff was tough enough to break the stick — really more of a twig — and I netted the fish and the wood. The bass was 15.25 inches.
I quickly had another bite on the same bait and it turned out to be a slab of a crappie cruising the shallows.
After a long time without another bite on that lure, I switched to another Ned-size offering, cutting a 4-inch Big TRD down to 3 inches and rigging it on a Gamakatsu 1/16-ounce No. 211 round jighead. It was in the Mudbug color, a kind of gray with copper flake that has worked for me in muddy water. It worked at Fork, except it didn’t catch the right fish. It started with a freshwater drum, which I really thought was a bass, then caught an 11-inch bass (too short to submit) and a channel cat of about 2 pounds.
So I had some fun fishing, I just didn’t catch enough of the right kind of fish.
Next up is Chicamauga in May, and all those Tennessee kayakers are going to be tough to beat. A whole bunch of them are in the Knoxville area and know that reservoir well. I think a lot of them are born with baitcasting gear in their hands, and in fact, four of the top 10 at Logan Martin were from the Volunteer State. My goal will be to show up Tuesday night so I can get a few days of fishing in before the tournament starts. I’ll be extra hopeful that I don’t finish 112th for the third time in a row.
Kayak frat
Generosity between kayak anglers is so common it doesn’t really amaze, but it’s not taken for granted. The night before the tournament in the motel parking lot, a small sedan with a kayak atop it was parked next to my truck at the motel. When I went out to sort through tackle in my truck, the sedan owner was just removing his tackle crate from the car.
Louis Conn, of Jacksonville, Texas, and I got to talking fishing on the lake, and he’d had some success pre-fishing. He gave me a couple of custom-made swimbaits, big ones, like 9-inchers, that needed an 8/0 hook.
“You won’t catch many with these, but when you get one, it’ll be a big ‘un,” he said.
His fish in pre-fishing, he said, ate a smaller swimbait rigged on a jighead that featured a belly spinner blade. He told me he was casting it right against shore in super skinny water and working it slowly.
Tournament morning I got down to my truck and Louis’ car and kayak were already gone. On my door handle was the same swimbait set-up he’d been using to catch fish. It looked great in the water, but, alas, didn’t work any better than the dozen or so other baits I threw in the course of the day.
Yes, going to kayak tournaments is about trying to be successful and see how one compares to the rest of the field.
It’s also about meeting guys like Louis Conn.
Dachshund update
This trip I took my dachshund Gus along s a travel companion. I left him home when I drove to Logan Martin and got daily texts from my better half about how many puddles and piles she found every night when she got home from work. He really figured out how to train me to not leave without him. As you can see in the picture, he adjusted well to motel life.