Saturday Report

[tadams]

Went out by myself and with the winds from the NE I decided Catawbe would be the best place to start. Got out early, before the charters, and as I was leaving the no wake zone I started marking fish every where. I set up to troll but with Rapalas not Bandits. Bam, 5 fish in the first pass going towards the reef all 19" plus with the largest at 25". Then low and behold all the charter boats started showing up, so I knew I was in the right spot. They were all drifting and doing pretty well with action so I decided to try dragging one rod with a golden nugget and crawler and casting a blade bait. I did that for and hour and a half and every boat was catching fish but not me. I hooked up a couple with the crawler but lost them all. So I said the heck with that, lets troll bandits. With only two rods, I started at 45/55 and over the next hour and half progressed down to 65 on both side (only 18-20 ft of water) nothing. Went back to casting/drifting and floated over a hump where there were always tons of marks... nothing. It was just starting to rain so I said heck with this I will troll back towards Catawbe with harnesses and caught four more just like that!

So my questions... what was I doing wrong with dragging a crawler and casting a blade, shouldn't that work? No stinger hook on the nugget was my excuse there and I was using a 3/8 blade bait and thought I was doing a pretty good job keeping it close to the bottom. I was using chrome blue and black and gold. What was up with the Bandits, 1.8 -2.0 was my speed? I was blaming 45-65 leads and just putting my rods to the side (no Church boards) so the short lead was to close to the boat. The rapalas were out 100-125+.

Anyway a good day, had to work hard to get the sixth fish but I guess that was better than being home by 8 am.

PS I wish the board would pick up again, seems very quite for as many boats and as many fish!

Best luck to all,

Tracy

[BILLY JOE]

brought boat back from turtle creek Saturday to my dock in PC after a ruff ride ended up fishing the same area you were in at 9am casting weapons and dragging bottom bouncers ended up with 10. fish were caught on bottom bouncers with worm harness and letting a 1 ounce weight just drag with worm harness

[tadams]

in those conditions what weight weapons were you using?