It’s raining outside today. It’s raining outside, and all I want to do is go fishing.
Fishing in the fall rain won’t phase any real bass-head, and it doesn’t phase me either. Actually, I welcome the rain, and I welcome the cold too, because it gives me a chance to understand the water in new conditions. It gives me a chance to go out there, start graphing and see what the fish are doing when a sudden rain hits after a serious drought like the one we’ve been dealing with in Alabama for a long time now.
Of course, I’m not fishing yet. I’m busy with holiday stuff, I’m reorganizing tackle for next season, I’m building a lot of tackle for next season and I’m mostly just dreaming about being on the water…any water.
But, if I was fishing, I would be out there graphing.
One of the things I miss most about California is fishing the November and December tournaments. That helped me out a lot because it gave me a chance to paint a picture of the lake year-round, not just during the tournament season that we have now. That’s not a knock on our schedule or anything, but man it’s nice to have that complete picture. Knowing what the fish are doing in the fall and winter is a huge piece of the puzzle.
My goal is, and has been for as long as I can remember, to fish more — even when the weather isn’t great. I want to fish more when it’s raining, like today, or when the water drops or when the lake is muddy. It all helps me figure out what the bass are doing, and it helps me to get in tune with them. It really helps me compete at a higher level too, because I start to understand where to fish and when and the causes and effects of what fish are doing. Should I be throwing a jig or a shaky head or a Carolina rig or a lipless crankbait? That all kind of depends on what I think the puzzle is telling me.
So, a day like today or yesterday — when I did get out on the water along with our first rain in about three months — on a day when a lot of water rushed into the lake, I especially want to go check it out. In one day, we accumulated something like 4 inches of rain. That’s something I want to see the fish react to.
On the graph — I’m using the new Humminbird HELIX 12 with megahertz technology — you can actually play with the sensitivity and tune it accurately enough to see the sediment rushing into the lake. Yesterday, I could see things like leaves and sediment the size of a grain of pepper. I looked around to see if the fish were getting pushed out or if they were coming in. I wanted to know what they’d do after living in stagnant water for months.
What I found was kind of weird. They were really inactive. You could see bait moving to the banks, but none of the big fish were coming to the surface. Big bait stayed deep, too. Small bait moved into coves and up shallow, and the bass were just hanging underneath these walls and walls of bait. I could see spots and stripers, and they weren’t moving very fast, because the water temperature also dropped about 10 degrees this week and their metabolisms aren’t moving very fast right now.
Every once in a while, they’d go in and get a big gulp of bait and come back. That was it.
But that was yesterday, and today is a new day. It could be totally different out there now, and that’s why I’m sitting in the garage building lures, preparing for next season and wishing I was out there in the cold and rain.
You gotta put the puzzle together.