It was the mid-1970s, and Mom and Dad were visiting my wife and me in Northern Virginia, where I was serving an extended tour of Navy duty in The Pentagon. Dad wanted to fish nearly every day of their two-week vacation, and I was more than happy to oblige. At the time, we were fishing Occoquan Reservoir, which allows only 10-horsepower outboards.
As luck would have it, on day 1 of our fishing, we found a wide carve-out in the shoreline, with a deep drop-off out in front of it. We anchored in the carve-out and immediately started catching some nice (3- to 7-pound) channel catfish from the drop-off. The action would be hot for a few minutes, then cool down. But the bite quickly would pick up again when one of the other boats on the lake would pass by in the channel, sending rollers toward us. And this same pattern held every day we fished for the next two weeks.
To say that Dad was having a ball would be an understatement. He hadn't caught any catfish that big in many years, and he regaled me with endless stories of earlier times when he last had caught catfish that size. For him, it indeed was like the kid in a candy store. He simply couldn't get enough of it.
That background, however, brings me to the discovery I made yesterday. While researching the Internet, I came across a Wired2Fish story that Shaye Baker had put together from an interview with Rick Clunn during the 2020 Bassmaster Classic on Lake Guntersville.
"Think about ledge tournaments in the summer," said Clunn. "We often see the fish feed like crazy during the artificial feeding period created by current generation and then shut down when the water turns off. That's when the game becomes 'What can I do to fire up the school?' One thing to keep in mind is that dams aren't the only thing that can move water.
"I had a place on Pickwick one time where I won an FLW event," continued Clunn. "Every single time a barge went by, it sucked water off the bank and then pushed it back up on the bank, causing the fish to bite."
Clunn also recalled another time...2010, as he related...on the Alabama River, where a similiar situation unfolded involving Greg Hackney. He was able to catch a few fish, and then the bite would die. He abruptly would crank his big motor, cut a few large donuts around where the fish had been surfacing, cut the engine off, and run back to the front deck.
Said Clunn, "The noise of the big motor didn't seem to phase the bass, but the disorienting effects of the sloshing waves sent the shad in every direction. This made the bass start chasing them again, and Hackney was able to catch a few more fish before they'd shut down, and he'd repeat the process.
"Just by staying on a spot, you can start to figure out little subtle things like that."
And so I now better understand why Dad and I spent most of two weeks catching big channel cats on Occoquan Reservoir that summer in the mid-'70s.
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