Good Numbers During Hartwell High School Bass Tourney

Lake Hartwell was clear last weekend, May 11, 2019, as high school anglers competed. The water temps were hovering in the mid to upper 70s in the main lake and upper 60s to lower 70s in the upper end in the Tugaloo State Park arm of the lake.

The fishing on Lake Hartwell is good right now for numbers, but most anglers, including us, had trouble finding the larger bass. We caught more than 30 fish in practice, butt mainly they were small largemouth and spotted bass. We were catching our fish mostly shallow with a multi-jointed swimbait and a soft jerkbait. We came to the lake expecting to fish the blueback herring spawn but had trouble finding the baitfish. Our fish we caught off of points spit up bluebacks, and the shallow fish we caught were spitting baby bluegills.

For deeper water fish we threw the swimbait and soft jerkbait mentioned earlier, but we also mixed in a drop shot and a soft paddle-tail swimbait for suspended fish. The fish on points seemed to be a little larger but still barely keeper size.

In the tournament, we ran north of our launch site at Tugaloo State Park. We fished a point and a small creek arm across from the ramp this area produced one keeper fish on a soft jerkbait. After no more luck here we ran around twelve miles up the river to a cove we did well in during practice. We finished out our small limit in this area with the soft jerkbait and one fish on a walking topwater. We had to go through about fifteen small non-keepers to find our limit on this end. We caught around twenty more fish before hooking another fish we could cull up. This fish came off a bluff wall we culled twice here very quickly so decided to run some more bluff walls with no more culls. After one bank we fished we decided to go around and fish a small dead reed patch were I lost a 2 ½ pound largemouth because my drag was set for open water. This fish also came on a soft jerkbait.

We finished with 7.10 with one dead fish which brought us down to 6.85 which was landed us 58th place in our last regular season tournament of the year. This placing brought us from 20th in AOY to 21st which is a little lower than I had hoped for the year. Our final tournament for the season which is the state classic will be a two day event held on Clark’s Hill we will have to finish 1st or 2nd here to punch our ticket to the national championship.

The winners Jacob Hodge and Logan Dixon from Greenbrier High School finished with 13.60 pounds they said the main things they fished were dog fennel and points. The targeted the fish holding here with a floating worm.