Sticking With the Plan

Sometimes catching fish isn't high on my list of needs when I arrive at a lake (even if it's what I'd like to do the most). Often, I need photos or information about locations or some seasonal technique, much more so than I need to catch fish.

Last Friday was one of those days. I needed details about 10 specific spots on Lake Moultrie for the first installment in a series of stories I'll be writing for South Carolina Sportsman. We needed to run to each spot, which were scattered all over Moultrie's 60,000 acres, to get photos and GPS coordinates, and with the wind blowing hard, getting from one spot to the next would be a gradual process.

We did intend to do some fishing, with hopes of getting fresh catfish photos. I told Kevin Davis that as long as we got the spots, it didn't matter to me whether we fished prime areas along the way or did all the necessary work first and then fished a while.

"We'll visit our spots and keep and eye on the graph. When we see fish on the screen, we'll put some lines down," said Davis, a Santee Cooper guide who is also the co-owner of Blacks Camp.

So off we went with notepad, camera, layers of clothes, stout tackle and fresh bait. Just as expected, it was very slow going, and circling the lake took a big part of the day. Defying expectations, the fish did not show up on the graph in the regular winter holes - places where they had been concentrated only a few days prior. Davis resisted dropping lines and drifting through the areas where the fish were "supposed to be" and stuck with his plan.

Instead, we continued working through our spots, ever watching the graph, and it was a good thing that we did. Davis ended up marking a bunch of cats in an area that normally doesn't begin holding fish for another month and that he dosen't normally fish in January. We put down baits and began drifting, and it wasn't long before Nathaniel was doing battle with a Santee Cooper blue.

Despite very limited fishing time and a bite that was "off " based on other guides' radio reports, we ended up putting five cats up to 25 pounds in the boat and got lots of great winter catfish photos in addition to the stuff I needed for my "spots" story. Nothing like setting a good plan and sticking with it!