Our trip to a trophy bass lake.

[carolina-rig-01]

A lot of you guys that are regulars in the chat room probably remember me saying a while back that Britney and I got a gift certificate to a trophy bass lake from my dad for Christmas. With all the stuff going on with the house being built and me changing jobs we knew that there would come a time that we needed to get away for a weekend so we held on to the gift certificate. Well this past September we decided we wanted to go up there and see if we couldn't catch a few big fish. I posted these pictures on facebook when we got back so some of you have already seen them, but now that I am finding time to come on here more often I thought I would post the pictures here as well. This place is a big strip pit that was dug decades ago for mining and offers very challenging conditions because the lake was totally dug out rather than filled by a dam, which means that all the natural depth changes or contour lines you find in a lake don't exist here. You can be 5 or 6 feet away from the bank and you might be in 20-30 feet of water. It still has some shallow areas but it really makes it overwhelming when you are looking around the lake trying figure out what to do. Anyways the owner of the property bought it and stocked it with Florida strain largemouth and has been managing it for trophy fish for around 20 years. During a conversation with the owner he told me that every year there is usually one fish in the 12-13lb range caught, and several 10lbers..........and he had pictures to prove it LOL. Anyways our trip was pretty much doomed from the word go, the weather was in the low 90's all week until the day we left and we had a cold front that dropped temps to close to freezing over night and highs were in the upper 50's and not a cloud in the sky. We stayed there for 2 nights and worked our butts off trying to find big fish but we had to settle for a good time and several average fish. This place sits on 2,000 acres and he has 3 cabins placed around the lake that he rents out to anglers and deer hunters. The cabins are all secluded and you have waterfront views and a dock with electric with each cabin. At no point did we see another person, and we only found one of the other cabins and that was because it is in the back of one of the coves we fished........we never did find the other cabin, you are certainly secluded here. The cabins are like no place I have ever stayed. All of them were built by the owner and are top notch places with all the comfort of home, they are beautiful. We had such a great time that we just called this last week and booked another trip for the end of April, hoping to hit it just right and get to do some sight fishing. Here are some pictures from our trip.