5-10 Windy keepers

Brent and his wife Cheryl were up from Virginia for a long weekend and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. It was 38 degrees when I put the boat in the water at 5am. This morning’s forecast called for 10-15 with gusts to 20 out of the NW… No big deal. Not the best conditions to fish but managable.

It didn’t take long to figure out that the weather man was way off… Thank God for the trolling motor, it got a workout today. I was able to keep the bow into the wind and slowly back down the flat. We fished the shallow flats in as little as 3 feet of water and never more than 6. As long as we kept the wind at our backs, they were able to make long cast and cover a lot of water. The first 2 fish came on the 7″ Revolution Shads. Nice, hard hits…

When we found the fish, we had hits on every cast. We kept motoring back up to stay on them and head plenty of action. The wind just kept building and by 7:30 or so the river was almost unfishable. It was hard to stand up in the boat, gusts of wind would just about knock you off of your feet. There were a few other die hards out as well… This is what we had to deal with.

We ran several miles up river looking for someplace to fish out of the wind but there just was no getting away from it today. We moved back to the original spot and put a few more fish in the boat before calling it quits. It was just too damned windy to fish effectively. At times, the waves on the flats were so bad, the prop for the trolling motor came out of the water. Brent put the last few in the boat and we headed for the barn.