Well, it was good to see Beaver Lake again. I actually kind of missed going there last year. Is it ok to say that as a bass fisherman? Anyway, I have always enjoyed my trips to Beaver Lake, although it is without a doubt one of, if not the toughest fishery that I have ever fished.
I believe this marks my tenth time coming here for an FLW Outdoors event, and I think I can honestly say I know as much about it now as I did the first time I visited many years ago. To me, it’s just one of those places where things are always different year to year, and what happened in previous years is always irrelevant to what is happening at the moment.
This year followed that pattern to a tee for me. It was lower than I have ever seen the lake, which sometimes can be a good thing for positioning the fish on key structure. However, when Beaver is low, I don’t really feel it forces the fish into certain places like it might on other impoundments. It is just so deep, with so much rock and timber that the fish still seem to spread out as opposed to grouping together as I feel they should in low water conditions.
True to form, my practice on Beaver started pretty slow. The first day I only had one solid keeper largemouth and just a handful of other bites. The water was in the low to mid 40s where I fished, which is about what I expected before I got here. I actually spent a fair amount of time fishing a float-n-fly, only to never get a bite. The second day I changed areas and managed to get 7 or 8 bites on the fly, with a few of those being keepers. This actually made me feel pretty good because I thought maybe I had learned what I needed to look for, at least for that kind of bite.
However, in pure Beaver Lake fashion day three yielded no fly bites whatsoever. By the end of the day, I did locate a few areas that I felt like I could catch some largemouth, which on Beaver means a lot.
Too bad those fish left me during the tournament. I knew I was in the right area, but just not the right spot. Walmart Pro Wesley Strader fished the entire tournament no more than 100 yards from my float-n-fly spot and he made the top 10, while I finished 100th. That’s just fishing.
Overall, I felt it was going to be a jerkbait tournament, with maybe a few other techniques mixed in, and I was right. Plus, I figured it was going to be a higher top-ten weight than any previous Walmart FLW Tour event we’ve ever had on Beaver, and it was. That just shows that Beaver Lake is not void of big fish. Unfortunately, I just didn’t get to hold enough of them.
But I’m ready to change that at Hartwell.