Fort Gibson BFL - Lightning in a bottle

Posted by ken on April 27, 2014

It has been a really long time since I have been as excited about an upsoming tournament.

But I was also nervous, I had not seen Fort Gibson prior to last Saturday (19th). The lake had been high and I had heard a lot of fish were being caught on the south end flipping wood. When I got here the lake was still a foot to a foot and a half high, but dropping rapidly. I caught a solid 2 on one of my first casts off the end of a dock with a 6th Sense Crush 50X and proceeded to catch several fish really shallow off wood with a hollow body swim bait. But it was almost as if you could feel it getting tougher. The water was falling, a couple of inches a day, and by the end off the day the bite had tapered off. The next morning I started out doing the same thing and the bite had evaporated.

I wanted to fish wood (frankly I was having fun)  so I started north looking for wood still in the water and late Sunday afternoon I found it, and the fishing was spectacular. I caught one over 5 and had several heavy 3's and light 4's all flipping the Senko and a Flappin Hog. Although I didn't weight them I felt certain I had between 22-24 lbs in about 2 hours Sunday afternoon, and then it was time to go back to work.

Through the week I watched online as the lake continued to drain, I was getting more and more nervous everyday. Thursday night I drove up and Friday daylight found me running north to my wood. When I got there I could see the bottom where I had caught those fish, I knew they were gone but spent an hour making long pitches to them and bouncing the square bill off them hoping they might be around. No bites, so I pulled out to the first break, no bites, out to secondary points in the area, no bites, I was so disappointed. I spent the day looking for more wood that was still wet and found one brush pile half in and half out of the water and got 3 bites off it none of which I pulled on. That evening I talked to my partner Dicky and he had a really good day fishing a carolina rig south so I planned my day to hit my brush pile and then try to blind squirrel up a limit on the c-rig.

Yesterday morning I ran straight to my brush pile and flipped a 5" Senko rigged on 20# Floro with a 3/16th ounce tungsten weight to the right edge of it, keeper #1 was a 1 1/2 but points and based on yesterday to have a keeper on my first cast was huge. Flip number two to the middle of the bush resulted in a solid 3# fish breaking me off because I didn't retie after pulling that first fish out. 10+ more pitches and no more bites. With nothing to fall back on I ran to the nearest secondary point and pulled my c-rig, about 8-10 casts later I had one thump it and swim off, I pulled on the fish and it felt really heavy, about 4 handle cranks later "poof" the fish pulled off. I thought maybe I had fired a school up so rather than rerig I picked up a hard head with a biffle bug (Kenneth Anderson shared that he had several good bites on it Friday) and I was right, another doink and swim off, and once again I pulled on a heavy fish but this one I didn't even turn, just pulled off going the other way.

Now to say I spun out might be an overstatement, or it might not. I was 40 minutes in, had 4 bites, and felt like I had put only the smallest bite out of the 4 in the box. So maybe I hadn't spun out, but 40 minutes later when I hadn't had another bite...yeah, I was spinning out then. And then really quickly the wind came up out of the south and clouds rolled in. Although I had not even thrown a spinnerbait in practice I know spring spinnerbait weather when I see it, so i pulled a 3/8 ounce spinnerbait out and ran a 1/4  mile to a secondary point further out in the mouth of the area I started in. First point keepers #2 & 3, both solid 2 1/2 lbers, next point a 3+, over the course of the next 70-80 minutes, which was all the cloud cover we had for the day I was able to cull through about a dozen keepers for 17-11. The rest of the say I caught a few fish here and there, but that flurry of slightly over an hour was my day, and it was good for a 5th place finish, and I continue to creep up the standings, now solidly in the top 10.