July 4th Fishing: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

By Chris Erwin

The 4^th of July is always special for my family. My daughter was born on the 4^th of July, so we try to get together at Cave Run Lake each year to celebrate both the birth of my first born and the birth of my country. Why this may sound a little sappy to some, I assure you it’s not to me.

It’s a time when we cook out, shoot off fireworks and spend time on the water. This year turned out to be muddy, soggy and filled with the good, the bad and the ugly.

Let’s begin with the good. It’s always good when you get your family together and I’m thankful for that. The fishing was spectacular to begin with. Scott, my son, and I headed out on the water about 2 pm, not the best time to start your day of fishing. However, when we followed the very advice I had included in my last article, it proved to be spot on.

We headed to a favorite outside bend in Licking River, one where the channel sweeps against the bank. In this bend, there are a line of trees just about three feet from the bank. This is a ledge where the channel steps down into about 20 feet of water.

We were casting everything you could think of looking for something that the fish wanted. Our best result was using one of the baits we have been making from the rapid prototyping plastic. While the bait looks like a medium running Bandit crankbait, these are a little different. They have no rattle and the bait is about 1.5 grams heavier than the Bandit. We do this using a recipe in which we can adjust the mixture of the plastic. This makes the lure run about three feet deeper than the original Bandit.

This bait was pearl white with red eyes. We put 42 bass in the boat that day, three over 16 inches, five between 15 and 16 inches and the balance being between 11 and 14 inches. We caught fish all day but they were spaced out. About 7 pm, it got very dark and the storms began to rumble. As the pouring rain began, we started catching a fish every three or four casts until it got so dark and we had to head in.

Now the bad… It rained all night. At times it rained so hard you could hardly see anything out of the windows of our place. When I got up the next morning to head back to our hot spot the first thing noticeable was the water had come up a couple of feet, and it was a lot more stained. After pumping off what seemed like a thousand gallons of water out of our boat, we headed out.

Once we hit the Licking River the water turned brown as toast and our hot spot turned out to be dead.  We only caught one fish on the spot where we were slaying them the day before. We decided to head back to Northfork since the water was a little better color there. When we got in sight of the Ky. 1274 bridge, my motor started slowing down and then died. We just looked at each other. I looked back at the 150 hp Mariner and smoke was rolling out of this puppy like it was on fire. It was obvious my water pump was not working.

We had no choice but to troll our way back, fishing what we could. It took four hours to make it back to our place on Northfork. We managed to catch only eight fish all day, nothing like the 42 the day before.

The ugly was us, of course, two drowned rats making our way back in a blistering rain with nothing but a trolling motor to bring us in.