Back on the River

Started a new project at work and it has my schedule all out of whack. This explains the latest trend of one post a week for this site. With the new project I’m putting in more hours, more hours means more money, but less free time, so it is kind of bittersweet. I didn’t think I’d be able to fish at all this past weekend, as the contractor works 7 days a week, but this new project is also weather dependent and we had some serious storms roll through over the weekend, dumping a lot of rain on the job site, so my services would not be needed.

Earlier in the week Kevin Andry sent me a message to see if I wanted to do a river float this weekend and initially I had to turn him down. Friday I called him up to see if he still wanted to go, provided we could find somewhere that wasn’t blown out. Luckily he was still game and the watershed I wanted to hit dodged most of the rain that came through.

I woke up Saturday to the sound of thunderstorms and I was worried we wouldn’t be able to head out. A quick check of the weather showed my house and to the south was surrounded by red on the radar, but where we were headed, looked clear. So we met up and pushed on to the put in, driving through rain, holding out hope that we wouldn’t get absolutely soaked while on the water. The skies were overcast as we put in, the water was a little higher and dirtier than it normally is in the summer. The area had only gotten a little over 2 inches of rain over the past week, at least that is what the downstream gauge indicated, who knows what had happened upstream. The good news was the float was definitely doable and we took off down the river.

Kevin and I started throwing poppers early on, the action was slower than anticipated though. I picked up the spinning rod to see if something subsurface would get their interest. Not too long into throwing a black spinnerbait I had a good bite. It was a nice spot, sitting right in front of a downed tree, which made things pretty interesting for me because the current was taking me right into that tree. I was able to keep him from running under and getting tangled in the branches and lifted the bass into my boat. It was actually bigger than I thought it was when it was on the line, a 2lb 3oz beauty. This is only the second Kentucky bass I’ve caught over 2lbs, the other came on a spinnerbait as well. Took some hero shots then sent it on it’s merry way.

The rest of the day would continue to fish slow whether I had the fly rod in my hand or the spinning rod. Kevin stuck it out with the poppers and caught fish here and there, we never really figured them out though, just one of those days. The weather held out on us and the sun even came out later in the day.

As we were loading up at the take out we realized that Kevin didn’t have any long straps in his Suburban and I didn’t pack any in my boat, so there was no way 2 boats were going on top of his vehicle. We could either take 2 trips or figure something else out. Luckily river trips are clean trips and at Kevin’s suggestion (gotta note that in case his wife reads this) we threw the Coosa into the Suburban. It actually was a nice fit with just a small portion of the boat out of the back glass.

Not a whole lot of fish caught overall, but still it was a great day to be out on the water. One that I really didn’t expect to make earlier in the week, which made it all the better. I am thankful we didn’t head down south and try to chase redfish because we would have been rained out in a hurry. We’ll have to make this float again in the Fall, when the temps start to come down, see if the bite has picked up.