I met Tom at the landing at 8:00 this morning after a beautiful sunrise on the way over to Wilmot. It only lasted about 30 minutes before the clouds came. Luckily I took a photo.

The temperature was in the high 30’s so rather cool idling down the lake. We idled because Tom was looking for the schools of fish. Soon he said “it’s on” because he had seen a fish make a move on the slick water. When we got to the spot the fish showed up on the depth finder and they were there in spades. I had a DT-10 on and Tom had a 3/4 ounce Jackhammer bladed jig. The DT-10 caught the first small fish but the Jackhammer came up with this 5 3/4 FOD.

The DT-10 was just touching the bottom in the 10 + foot water and the Jackhammer was sinking the bottom and was paused every few turns of the reel to let it sink back to the bottom. The bottom of the lake is covered with cypress needles and Spanish moss that has fallen out of the trees so running the DT-10 on the bottom is not the thing to do. It needed to be run close to the bottom and slow. There were clouds of shad with the bass chasing them and every now and then coming up and just blasting them. When the bass would hit sparkling shad went everywhere. Evidently after hitting them the fish returned to the bottom as most of the fish we caught were close to the bottom. It was frustrating at times with fish running shad all around the boat but you couldn’t get a bite. Finally I connected with a 5 1/2 on the DT-10.

We were fishing in the same general area because the fish were not moving much. It seemed they were moving slightly in the direction that the wind was blowing. Even where there were no bass there were clouds of shad. In fact when we tried a Johnson Sprite spoon we both came up with the shad impaled on the hooks. Tom said his goal today was for us to catch 20. At about 2:30 we had 16 and there was a lull on our bites but not on the bass activity. A crappie fisherman came by to chat and as he left all visible activity ceased but Tom soon caught a 4+ right on the bottom.

We surmised the fish retreated to the bottom because of the boat disturbance. The fish continued their assault on the shad and soon we had our 20 at 3:00. There were some other good fish caught and they were all fat because of all of the shad for them to gorge on. After we caught number 20 we were guessing its weight. It looked to be one that in lake Ferguson I would weigh thinking it was 3 pounds and it would turn up 2-13 every time. This one was 3-1 and was fat as could be. A wonderful day of January fishing. On the way home I came up with an idea of how to make them bite next time.