I fished today with Dennis Wilson from Fredericton. As far back as I can remember Dennis has been the guy to beat in Provincial Bass tournaments. After spending the day in the boat with him I can understand why. He doesn’t miss a thing and is dead bang on with every cast.
We started off at the ramp by the Canada Customs office at the head of East Grand Lake. Not room for a lot of trailers but pretty good if you get up early. We idled out of the small channel and then headed down the lake to the gorge. I had marked all of the visible rocks here last year in my jet boat and transferred the waypoints onto my Lowrance GPS on the Stratos. Even with the rocks marked I took the time to idle through this area. Lower units cost about six thousand dollars and I have already been down that road three times. Five minutes at idle didn’t seem like such a bad idea.
We weren’t stopped for two minutes when Dennis was into a fish. The second cast he made with a Zoom Fluke put a nice 2.5 lb smallie in the boat and in the next ten minutes he caught three more just like it. You notice I said he put three more in the boat. This is the start of a bad day on the trolling motor and may also be a sign of a disturbing trend. You see, last show’s guest angler Glen Hunter, put a beating on me from the back of the boat as well. Apparently neither of these guys subscribes to the theory that the guy at the front of the boat catches most of the fish. At least today I had a bit of an excuse with a pulled muscle in my back and some Robaxacet in my system.
We found fish in various stages of the spawn and saw many cruising fish that could not be tempted into a strike close to the boat. Many of the hits we had on the deeper side of the breaks were undoubtedly cruisers, they were just far enough away that the boat didn’t have them spooked.
Dennis’s fish came on White Flukes with a couple of different retrieves and on a multi hued Chartreuse tube. I mixed it up a bit and threw a variety of Husky Jerks, Blue Fox in-line spinners, tubes and some Flutter Worms. I was using 6’6” Medium Heavy Compre and Crucial rods with 2500 Stradics and 8lb Seige mono except for the Blue Fox which I threw on a medium action Crucial. I used twenty pound Power Pro with an 8 pound fluorocarbon leader for the Flutter Worms. I am still a mono guy at heart but when you are making long casts with soft stick baits, Power Pro is the way to go for an instant hookset. Just a bit too much stretch with the mono that far out from the boat.
We didn’t get to fish out a full day on this trip but we had a lot of fun and put seventeen fat smallies in the boat. Good company and some decent fish-not a bad way to spend a day
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