Murphy on Murray

Dark skies and little breeze made Lake Murray largemouths tough customers yesterday, and fast-approaching rain gave Michael Murphy and I only a few hours to run around the lake.

That's OK. Spending time on Murray with Michael Murphy is always a great education and a lot of fun.  A pro angler who lives only a few miles from the lake, Murphy knows Murray very well, and he does a fabulous job of putting things into words. Although the fish weren't jumping into the boat, Michael did catch a couple of bass on a buzzbait, which was cool, considering that spring patterns are way behind schedule and the water is still only about 50 degrees.

I'll be talking with Michael and other Murray experts quite a bit this spring and summer in anticipation of the Forrest Wood Cup. Watch the FLW website for lake reports I'll be filing.

Sampling Murray

Clouds are thickening, and the rain is on it's way. Still, I'm here, and Michael Murphy is up for giving it a shot, so we'll see what South Carolina's Lake Murray has to offer is this morning.
Murray will be the site of the Forrest Wood Cup, later this summer, so I'm paying careful attention to how it is fishing this spring. Word I've heard so far is that it has produced a lot of large fish early in the year.
First stop this morning was JC's Outdoors in Gilbert to grab a licence and a cup of coffee and to meet Michael.

Pinpoint Patterning

"If they're here, this should be the cast, Michael Murphy said confidently as he released his thumb and sent a bait sailing. We'd made half a dozen casts apiece since pulling up on this area, but he had told me that we'd start a little off from where the fish "should" be. As if the bass had read his script, Murphy leaned into a chunky fish about five cranks into his retrieve.

He had done the exact thing on the previous spot, making a handful of presentations before calling the cast that should produce, and then catching a fish on that cast. He had then explained what he had figured out based on other fish we'd caught that morning.

From time to time an angler "calls" a fish on a perfect-looking piece of shoreline cover, but we weren't working the bank. Murphy's called casts were off long points and were based upon the slope of the point, the distance out, the depth the boat was over, the direction of the wind... The bass were relating to specific types of points in a very specific way, and by fishing a handful of spots and paying attention to every detail, he truly had figured it out

An FLW Tour pro, fishing buddy and ever-eager source of great information, Murphy was helping me with a specific story project. We spent the biggest part of our day doing photo work but still managed a 21-pound bag from our best five. "We'd have won today," Murphy said with a grin as he weighed the last fish, knowing that most recent local tournaments had been won with weights in the mid to upper teens.

Murphy also figured out what the striped bass were doing on the same day, and he used his knowledge of Lake Murray to run a few key spots, where together we caught at least 25 stripers.

One of the greatest privileges of writing fish stories for a living is having the opportunity to spend time on the water with many of the best anglers out there. If I don't learn a thing or two that I can't pass along in stories, I'm not doing my job very well!