A DAY WITH THE BOARD KING
Living close to the Board King (BK) has its advantages, from tips on how/where to fish certain areas of a lake as well as being honored with an invite to go fishing on an occasional basis. You are also subject to the verbal abuse he likes to hand out to anyone in earshot. I was in earshot all day long. Got the honored invite, and met BK at the designated spot (he complained I was late but I had to walk the dog). Got to the ramp and launched the boat, we were expecting the boat ramp to look like the parking lots in Knoxville during a UT home game, but we were surprised with only 2 empty trailers at the ramp lot. We still figured there would be traffic jams on the water with the weather forecast of low 60’s and calm winds. Pleasantly surprised again with few boats (maybe 5 at the most) but we still got to endure a couple maroons that really don’t need to own boats as they cut us off a couple times. BK doesn’t like people to cut him off when he’s fishing. We started off with a couple shorts, and kept changing colors to find the color of the day. I started out with anything that had blue since blue works 9/10 times on the Chick. Not today. Finally ran out of blue colored lures, and went to orange, BINGO. Popular color was BGBS Sunrise on a 1/16 jig about 4-6’ behind the BK boards. We would catch 2 or 3 and then hit a lull in the action, then 2-3 more, then another lull. I then added an orange colored jig head, and the action picked up some more. We still would only catch 2 or 3 at a time and a lull, but the lulls got a bit shorter. BK shared this info with one of his buddies (not one of the maroons) and the buddy had some good results with the BGBS Sunrise as well. Sometimes we had boards go down at the same time which is always more fun.
BK was also determined to see how shallow the fish actually were as we saw one boat (not the maroons) head into the shallows and they stayed longer than BK wanted them too. They left and we headed into the shallows (<2 FOW). Did not matter what color you had in the shallows, all we caught were a couple stickfish and lots of mud. BK’s boat is a bit on the heavy side due to his “special anchor”, but still a good trolling boat. With the added weight of the “special anchor”, we proceeded to leave a path of kicked up mud everywhere we went in the shallows, to the point we had to totally quit fishing, and try and get the *&^% out of the shallows without getting stuck. Big motor is trimmed up all the way, I move to the center of the boat in a weak attempt to raise the stern a fraction of an inch, I’m calling out the depths (less than 1FOW, 1.5 FOW, 1.3 FOW, etc) while BK tries to backtrack thru the shallows. We are still leaving a trail of mud from the TM but making progress. We make it out to deep water (4 FOW) and breathe a sigh of relief. WT was 48-50*, so I was not all that interested in getting wet to get the boat out of the mud. I notice several clumps of mud on the prop but say nothing at this time.
We were still changing colors looking for another winner, and I found some “butt ugly” lures in the bag, body is a blue/green combo (think aquamarine) and a bright orange grub tail (AKA butt ugly) and with the orange painted jig head, we had two winners. We also had limited luck with a Strike King Cajun cricket Thunder lure, but basically you needed a lot of orange to get a decent bite going. Tim shows up after lunch, and is fishing another area on the other side of the main river channel and is doing good so we go over where he is and start picking up some. We had about 18 keepers before the move and continued with the big orange party, finished the day with 30 keepers, a couple were real close to 12” and most had some shoulders on ‘em, typical for fish in the Chick. The verbal abuse continued after the move as he kept yelling at me to watch the boards more and my phone less as I was texting the wife with status updates and dinner plans. Didn't matter to BK as his focus was catching fish. LOL
BK paid me a rare compliment while loading up the boat since he backed the trailer down, and I put the boat on the trailer. He said no one had ever put his boat on the trailer straight on their first attempt, which I happened to do. Guess I balanced out that "special anchor" of his. LOL Now if I can just do that with my boat. LOL I did mention the wind was calm didn’t I. And it was a good day with the BK. Thanks for the invite Chris/Tenncrappie. Enjoyed it a lot.
http://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/...pso77rh9se.jpg
http://i1281.photobucket.com/albums/...pszwnelu3b.jpg
Again, thanks for the company and opportunity to fish with you again.
