Bass Fishing On Truman Lake- What A Day!

Well Wednesday morning My buddy Greg and I, got up before daylight, hooked up to my bass tracker and headed for Truman lake. By before daylight , I mean about 4:30 am. Now that is like going deer hunting , pretty dag um early in the morning but , the weather was supposed to be clear and sunny , upper 70s and after the last 3 or 4 days it has been in lower 60s and windy, so it sounded promising to us. Now Greg Is a little grumpy and looks like that bear in the 7/11 commercial, till he gets some coffee in him, so we stopped and had a good breakfast and some hot coffee at a little but busy cafe in Lebanon.

We filled up our thermoses and headed to Truman , pedal to the metal, and normally that's OK. Normally! Not this morning about 3 miles before we left hwy 65 we met a state trooper, name withheld of course, because he pulled us over and after we explained why we were in such a hurry, 75 in a 65, he smiled calmly wrote me a warning ticket and wished us luck on our day, after warning us if he caught us speeding again, well you know the rest of the story as Paul Harvey would say.

By the time we backed the boat into the lake at an undisclosed access , for obvious reasons, ;-) We headed back into one of our honey holes. It was back in a creek fed cove, again undisclosed information, in hopes to find Old Bucket Mouth during his or her early morning feed. We fished till about 11:30 only caught 3 line sides and one of them was a 16 inch keeper.

Now this is a big cove, full of log jams and tree tops and the usual rip rap you would find, with a large creek running into the cove . Now the cove was clear and the creek was running in colored or dirty, So I guess they had some rain upstream sometime the day or night before. It wasn't muddy just colored. We stopped and ate a sandwich and drink a soda, lunch or brunch I guess you could say.

I told Greg , we need to fish the cove once again, and because it was sunny and the sun was pretty high, I tried a different approach. Earlier we had tried crank baits and plastic worms and jigs with not much luck. I figured we covered the bottom with the jigs and worms and medium with the crank baits. So I tied on a chartreuse lunker lure. Now some people say that is not a good Idea In the fall, especially October 30th, and Greg laughed at me.

We fished about 15 minutes and Greg caught about a 5 lb bass on a shad rap, and THEN it started happening. I started catching , one throw after the other , Huge white bass and stripers and hybrids on that old lunker lure , WOW! You should have seen Greg , he was so busy netting fish for me that he couldn't,t fish!

I had caught 2 huge stripers around 18 lbs, 1 hybrid about 6 lb and a half a dozen 2-3 lb white bass. WOW! I had to stop and get me a cup of coffee and a cigarette, before I had a heart attack. What an Adrenalin rush!

Greg's eyes, were as big as saucers and he was running from one end of the boat to the other trying to find a lunker lure. I stopped him , gave him a lunker lure of my own to keep him from having a heart attack too! HA! Like a couple of kids we were!

He got tied on and we both smoked some cigarettes and drank some coffee, after about 20 minutes I told Greg, we were gonna go back to bass fishing ;-) He informed me that I was politically incorrect, and then he realized I was pulling his leg. I suggested swinging back around to the creek and hitting all that water again and he eagerly agreed! HA!

Now I know that this is going to sound like a yarn, but as we approached the mouth of the creek , we quietly approached this big old log jam again and proceeded to throw , at the same time, and the lunker lures 20 ft apart and exactly as they started gurgling , got slammed, we had doubled with 2 big stripers, how big we didn't know but the fight was on! After about 15 minutes mine rolled on his side and I netted him, as I lifted him into the boat he came off the lunker lure in the net, I got lucky! Greg was still fighting his and he said mine would weigh about 15 lbs. Hes good at guessing stripers. Finally his came up to the boat and turned up on its side and I netted it for him, and pretended it got off, I actually lifted it up just enough to give him a lot of slack line and start yelling that he got off, I thought he was going to throw me in , until I turned around with a big net full of striper. He guessed him at about 23 lbs.

My Lunker lure was tore up and wouldn't work so I then tied on a shad colored 1/2 oz Rat-L-Trap, wouldn't you know it? That's rather ironic and I even mentioned to Greg that I had posted an article on that very lure just a few days before, and laughed and said Probably wont catch a thing.

Now This keeps sounding like a big fishing yarn for sure, but its the truth! The whites and stripers started SURFACING! We caught one fish after another for about 45 minutes and we limited on stripers and whites and was culling 2 lb whites because they were too small! I never seen anything like it in my life and Greg said the same thing. I finally sat down , exhausted and laughed my @#$ off at Greg, I swear , I thought he was either gonna fall in or have a heart attack, or both. Finally he quit, exhausted, too!

It was time for another coffee break and it was only about 1:30pm. We sat there and contemplated our next move , to finish the day hopefully finishing our limits on some old bucket mouth bass. We cruised about 4 miles to another hot spot of mine, and finished out the day, we only caught 4 more bass making a total of 5 keepers , the 4 we caught at hole number two was 4lb -6 lb.
Even though we came to catch large mouth , and we only caught 5 all day , We both admitted that we had the time of our life.
He and I will always remember this fun day.

I have fished the lakes40 yrs and only been in the Surfacing whites 2 times now. My dad is almost 78 and been there 1x , but I bet not one of us will ever forget it! I hope each and everyone of you get to experience that at least once in your lives, and I bet you will never forget it when it does happen. I have been told its nearly impossible to catch stripers on artificial lures , but I knew that was wrong, because I have caught lots of stripers trolling shad raps.

That day they was on lunker lures, and rat-l-traps , and who knows what else, because we never threw any other lures , once we got bit. So , we drove home and spent most of Wednesday night cleaning fish, when we got home, but it was fun, and it was worth every penny spent, and the time it took to do it. We had truly enjoyed the "Great Outdoors!"

I hope you enjoyed reading about our fantastic fishing adventure, so, until next time, keep your hooks wet, see ya out there! And make sure YOU enjoy the "Great Outdoors!" ;-)