1bigfish
05-21-2008, 09:44 AM
Sorry for the late report but I have been trying to catch up on my sleep and I still have not even down loaded my pics from the trip. Dragon67(Dan) and I left early Tuesday morning for Woodhead. On the way we stopped and looked at water level at Hewitt. The water was way down as we already knew and very muddy. As we continued our drive we kept our eyes open for Thecrease(Clayton) since we knew he was supposed to be fishing Oxbow that day. Well as luck would have it we saw him out on the water and pulled off the road to say hi. He was fishing the other side of the river at the time but we called him over and told him to try the spot right under where we where standing since we could see some rock that were just below the water. Well he did and right away hooked into a BIG fish. The fish made a run for the current and started taking line fast. Poor Clayton never had a chance since he didn’t even have his trolling motor down to chase the thing and he could not stop the fish from getting into the current. Well the fish eventually got loose on him after about a 2 minute battle. We figure it was a big cat by the way the fish was fighting. As we stood there laughing at Clayton he proceeded to land 3 bass on his next 4 cast so we decided we needed to quit BSing and get on the water. Since Clayton had already told us the pattern was to fish crappie looking lipless cranks on the flats we started picking up fish pretty quickly. We only got to fish for about 4 or 5 hours the first day but I still managed to pick up 34 smb and Dan picked up 46 or something like that. The next day(WED) both Dan and I and Clayton and his stepdad went back to Oxbow and pick up right where we had left off. I stopped counted my fish somewhere around 30 but Clayton kept track of the number he caught. Clayton finished the day with 174 smb. I figure I had a little under a 100 for the day. About one out of every five smallies we caught had a crappie tail in it’s mouth which pretty much explains our choice in lures. Thursday morning Clayton left and Dan and I decided to start fishing Brownlee. We tried to target perch but failed to really figure out a pattern. We spent most of the day running from spot to spot and even went all the way up the Powder Arm to Hewitt. We ended up only catch 8 perch. The smallest was 11.5 inches and the biggest was 16. Good size but just could not find any schools. It was cool to look at all the structure that is usually under water and we took some pics of places to try next year if the water is up. Friday we started fishing Brownlee for bass. It took a couple of hours but we did finally get a good pattern going. For us we got most off our smb fishing points with a gentle slope. We also found that we had to keep it on the bottom. Shakey head robo worms and Houdini worms worked much better then a senko on a dropshot. The average size of our fish was about 1.5 to 2 pounds. The average on Oxbow was much smaller for us. Saturday was about the same but we had to fish much harder to find the fish because of the bass tourney that was going on it was hard to find an empty spot we wanted to fish that someone hadn’t already sore lipped all the fish.
We spent a couple of nights catfishing down on Oxbow and did well but all our cats were between 16inches and 4lbs so no real size to them at all. All the crappie we caught on Oxbow and Brownlee were 11 to 13 inches. Of course that could have something to do with the fact that we never fished for the crappie and only caught 4 of them while bass fishing. Looking at what everyone else was catching it looks like 7 to 8 inches was the norm. I did land a nice 8lb carp which made great cut bait for the cats.
We also ran into EZOP at Woodhead. Man I feel sorry for that guy. While Dan and I got to sit out all day in the baking sun fishing he had to be off the water early everyday and sit in his air conditioned trailer eating a five course gourmet meal that DD would cook for him every night. Poor guy. And I also heard he got out fished by her everyday they were there.
I will put up the pics tonight or tomorrow.
We spent a couple of nights catfishing down on Oxbow and did well but all our cats were between 16inches and 4lbs so no real size to them at all. All the crappie we caught on Oxbow and Brownlee were 11 to 13 inches. Of course that could have something to do with the fact that we never fished for the crappie and only caught 4 of them while bass fishing. Looking at what everyone else was catching it looks like 7 to 8 inches was the norm. I did land a nice 8lb carp which made great cut bait for the cats.
We also ran into EZOP at Woodhead. Man I feel sorry for that guy. While Dan and I got to sit out all day in the baking sun fishing he had to be off the water early everyday and sit in his air conditioned trailer eating a five course gourmet meal that DD would cook for him every night. Poor guy. And I also heard he got out fished by her everyday they were there.
I will put up the pics tonight or tomorrow.