BY Chris Erwin
There was a time when many of my friends referred to Grayson lake as the Dead Sea, That time has come and gone. With the help of the DFWL, Grayson Lake has produced good fish off and on all this year, and the Fall is no exception.
I ran into an old friend this past week, Larry Kitchen. Him and his friend Tom Coffee, have been spending some time catching some good bass and Hybrid Bass on Grayson Lake. I have known these two boys for more than 25 years, and you can bet if the fish are biting, they will figure out how to catch them.
Both men lost their wives to illness within weeks of each other. They continue trying to make sense of the pain of losing their life long partners, something I have thought about and realize we all have our crosses to bear. Linda Coffee and Susie Kitchen may have got their wings, but I think about them often, both have been my fishing partners over the years, and I know how much they loved their husbands.
I had fished both with and against these two men over the years in more tournaments than I can count; However, it would be a safe bet that when it was time for the weight-in, these two guys would have a sack of fish.
While most anglers were struggling to find fish on Grayson Lake, Kitchen and Coffee were finding fish with regularly using an old stand by, the spinnerbait. Saying a spinnerbait or a worm isn’t telling anyone much they are a thousand spinnerbaits or worms on the market, and not just anyone will do.
This fall, the fish on Grayson have been staging in about eight feet of water near some type of structure. Your bait needs to meet some requirements to get these fish to strike. This is the bait makeup that has been working for them.
They were using a 3/8 oz bait with tandem blades. One blade was an Indiana blade and one on the wire, a Colorado blade. The blades need to have enough beads to give them separation as they fall. In their case, a short straw made for spinnerbait was used instead of a bunch of beads. This reduced the weight while still giving them the distance they needed to let them spin as they drop.
The next key was to fish areas that had hard bottoms, like roadbeds, standing or laydown trees, old bridge sites, or points that had quick descending shorelines. They let the bait drop to the bottom till the line went slack if the strike didn’t accrue on the fall, they would pick up the bait with the rod tip and slowly move the bait trying to keep it in the strike zone. Reeling just fast enough to keep the blades spinning.
The next key is color, on bright days, they used clear with metal flick skirts, and the skirts were trimmed, so they were just long enough to cover the single hook using no trailer. On dark days or in late-day evenings, they used a skirt referred to as bluegill color. It was a makeup of a few different dark colors giving off a flash that seem to trigger strikes that other colors just didn’t do.
Kitchen told me that “Grayson Lake has been getting better each year, the days of the “dead sea” are about over.”
If you get out there and have a great day tell me about it, you just might end up in the paper. Until next time keep your line wet and take a kid fishing.
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