Preparation Beech

Early morning launch... under 30 degrees... I'm not one to typically put myself through such temps, but I wanted to do some practice fishing, and my dad was in town from Colorado and wanted to wet a hook...

What I thought would be a productive pattern on this chilly morning quickly proved to be effective early, as a Carolina rigged junebug lizard had some feisty, little bass fired up within a few minutes of hitting my first spot. We ended up boating around 9 smaller largemouth bass within the first hour and half of hitting the water.

Our first several casts and retrieves ended with either of us having to drag the top few guides through the water to clear off the frozen droplets picked up when reeling in, but it wasn't too long before the sun snuck up over the East bank of the pocket we were fishing, and things got to be pretty comfortable. As the water and air began to warm, the activity on the lake seemed to really pick up, as bait could be seen jumping and swimming about, and Herons began perusing the banks in search of baitfish. My dad and I focused the majority of our efforts on secondary points, drains, etc., dragging soft plastics, and occasionally throwing some reaction baits when we got close enough to the bank to hit isolated logs, and other pieces of cover we could see with our polarized sunglasses.

We moved around the lake quite a bit, in search of water temps that were a bit warmer than where we started our day. Eventually we managed to find one stretch on the main lake that had gotten sun most of the morning, and was beginning to receive the majority of wind as the day progressed. Immediately we began getting bites dragging soft plastics, and as we worked into a few pockets, I continued throwing a Rapala BX Brat squarebill, hoping to elicit a quality bite from a pre-spawn bass moving up to take advantage of the sun and slightly warmer water we had found.

The photo above was the best fish of the day, taken on the aforementioned BX Brat, in a Red Craw pattern. She hit the bait as I bounced it off the bottom end of a personal boat ramp towards the middle of a main-lake cove, in about 4 feet of water. She absolutely smashed it, and there was no question when she hit, that she was a solid fish! Not the biggest to come from Beech by any means, but a good sign of things to come as Spring arrives in Tennessee!