Those 3 Barges Should Have Been 300

In case you're wondering what I'm talking about, Rob and I launched and were headed out of West Neck Creek about 5:45 this morning. When we reached the mouth and turned left, the spotlight from a barge was shining ever so brightly directly into our eyes. We were blinded momentarily, so we eased back into West Neck Creek to let the barge pass. Once it had cleared, we headed out again but was forced to return to the creek a second time because of another barge coming at us. A third such encounter made us decide just to cool our jets for a spell and fish a while in West Neck.

In the first hour, Rob boated this keeper bass and one more a little smaller on a topwater. He also had some other fish take a swipe at his bait without getting a hookup. Meanwhile, I, too, boated one about the size of the fish in this picture on a different topwater and had another fish that evidently needed eyeglasses splash at my topwater at least six times consecutively--on one cast--and never did get the bait.

We then made a mistake. We decided to leave West Neck--and the fish we had found there--and run to Blackwater. We figured if the bite was on in one spot, it would be on in another, but that was not the case. After fishing a stretch of water in the front end of Blackwater without any success, we cranked up and ran to the back. I'm here to tell you that chocolate syrup has nothing on the water we found back there.

Muddy water in the back end of Blackwater has foiled many of my plans over the years, but today was, far and away, the worst I've ever encountered. All it took was for me to turn around and see the look on Rob's face to understand that he wanted to leave as badly as I did.

From there, we came back upriver to Albright's Creek. The water there was in super good shape, and we saw lots of fish moving, but therein, the compliments have to stop, because the bass were being as tight-lipped there, as they were down in Blackwater. We simply couldn't buy a strike.

Finally, about an hour before we had made a pact to end our day, I suggested that we run back and finish up in West Neck, where we had started.

In hardly no time, Rob had put this, his third and biggest keeper, in the boat--again on a topwater. Some cloud cover had moved in temporarily, making topwater baits a good choice for another period of several minutes.

My highlight of the day was coming home with one less rod than I started the day. I was tossing around a SwimSenko today when, all of a sudden, about 20 inches of the tip snapped off on a cast.

Fortunately, I always have spares parked in my rod carousel in the den, so all I had to do when I got home was grab one, slap on the Lew's reel from the broken rod, and I was good to go again. Otherwise, a trip to Bass Pro Shops in Hampton would have been in my plans for tomorrow.

This brings me to the reason I, in the title for this post, said those 3 barges this morning should have been 300. If there had been that many, we undoubtedly would have stayed in West Neck all day long and likely would have caught a lot more fish than we did. It's a case where we both felt like we beat ourselves today. Perhaps one of these days, we'll both learn that when you get on fish, you don't leave 'em--no matter what.