After hearing a nice talk from Pat McGriff on Thursday night, Pat and I met up early on Friday morning and made the drive to Keaton. We got the boat in the water and made a long run North. We settled into our first spot and saw a familiar boat working the shoreline. Sure enough, there’s Warrior fishing some oyster bars. We trolling motor around them after hearing Ashley say, "JR said he'll shoot a hole in your boat if we see you in our holes.”
All the trout we found were schooled up and we caught trout in one of our spots every cast for well over 25 minutes. They weren’t big fish (all around 17”), but goal #1 for every tournament is to get five. We found two or three spots where the trout were stacked up and decided to back out and fish some new water in hopes of saving a few fish for Saturday.
We continued working the shoreline and I had one almost rip the rod out of my hands. I fought the fish about five minutes and brought in a football of red. It measured 27 1/8” and weighed right at 8 lbs, but it got a free pass to go back in the drink. Pat picked up a fat 22” in trout in the same cove. At about 3 p.m., we decided to head back to the marina to pick up some charcoal, check in to the motel and grab a bite to eat.
After relaxing for an hour and a half, Pat said that he wanted to go back out and look at some areas to the South. We drove South in the boat for 5 or 6 miles and found some nice grassy bottom and started chunking. A while passes and I see another familiar boat come screaming across the flat and I flagged down BayGator. He and Bo pulled up and shot the bull with us for a while. BG was a little cranky though, he doesn’t like getting too far from his nipple in SJB.
We took it in about 6 p.m. and got ready for the cookout. The beers and BS were flowing on Friday night and I enjoyed talking with all of y’all.
Saturday, March 7
I woke up at 3 a.m. on Saturday morning to check on the boat and came back in the room and tried to sleep. Got out of bed and showered about 5 a.m. and began packing my stuff and getting the boat ready. We started checking people in at 5:45 and let everyone go at 6:30. Pat and I still had to get drinks and check out of the motel, so we finally were able to push off the dock about 7:00. We made the trek North again and after a 30 minute run, started fishing. We fished as shallow as we could over broken bottom, but got no love for the first two hours of the day. There were tons of baitfish present and breaking the surface, but no predator fish were feeding.
Around 9 a.m. the tide started moving in and we finally had enough water to get where we’d caught them the day before. We ease into the mouth and start seeing trout scatter. The PP goes down and we began catching barely legal 15” trout on every cast. After about 10 minutes, this got old and so we moved to another area. It’s worth mentioning that boats were everywhere to the North and it seemed like someone was in every cove from Spring Warrior to Rock Island. We fished a couple more coves to the North and saw some big trout, but the boat traffic around us had the big fish skittish.
We decided to move South a couple miles to where we caught our fish in last year’s tournament. We were fishing a little cove about 200 yards long with lots of rocks and broken bottom with creek mouths on either side. After dropping the trolling motor, I saw fish scatter everywhere and so I set the PP down. Pat’s first cast results in an 18” trout as does mine. Later I pluck a 23” trout out of the group and we both continue to catch 18” trout on every cast. If we went more than 3 casts each without catching a fish, I’d pick the PP up and trolling motor up 50’ and set the PP down again. We caught trout steady for an hour. The only problem was that they were 18” and not 19”.
I learned a valuable lesson at the weigh-in: if it’s early March, chances are that similar-sized trout are going to be schooled up together. I’d never really noticed the fish segregating themselves like that, but it became very apparent that that’s what was happening on Saturday. We should’ve moved after we filled out limit, but it’s really hard to leave fish biting.
We took it to the hill about 2:30 p.m. so we could get the boat on the trailer and get everything ready for the weigh-in at 3:30. We weighed 11.33 lbs and came in 7th; it was a fun day as we caught over 30 keeper trout, but we were donators this time nonetheless. There were some great fish weighed and congrats to all of our winners. I look forward to seeing y’all at JBT in April.
Dayum, I'm glad I sat this one out. 
Excellent report Mr. Cook. 
