Swimming Slither Rigs with Shaw Grigsby

New video on our YouTube Channel. Thank you to Shaw Grigsby for sharing. To learn more from fishing pros and guides, be sure to check out our channel. Hit "Subscribe" to keep up with new videos as they are posted!

Eufaula, Alabama: a Fishing Town

It should come as no surprise that the mayor of Eufaula, Alabama is a serious bass fisherman. Lake Eufaula, after is, is often dubbed "the bass capital of the world," and folks in the town of the same name, whether or not they fish, obviously value the fishermen who come to town. Mayor Jack Tibbs has fished Lake Eufaula since he was a boy and began fishing tournaments while he was still in his teens. He loves to talk about fishing ad about Lake Eufaula with anyone who wants to exchange fish stories.

I enjoyed listening to Mayor Tibbs talking about fishing a few evenings this week as a group of outdoor writers, fishing pros and folks from the town Eufaula, Phoenix Bass Boats and the Alabama Bass Trail sat together around the dinner table after days on the water. Even outside our our group, I could tell that people in town appreciated visiting anglers and were hopeful that we were catching fish and enjoying the lake and the area.

I also got my first samples of Lake Eufaula bass fishing and learned that as legendary as the lake is for its offshore fishing, it's also a fine place to flip soft plastics or swim a jig around pads and other shallow vegetation. Elite Series pro Russ Lane found a bass that approached 10 pounds within the first hour of fishing while cranking an offshore ledge with another writer. An hour later, when I joined him in the boat, Lane moved shallow and proceeded to catch several chunky largemouths from less than a couple of feet of water before lunchtime.

I definitely was impressed with my first visit to Lake Eufaula and look forward to the next visit!

Closer-to-Home Eufaula

Until I was asked which Lake Eufaula I was headed toward this week I hadn't stopped to think about the odd fact that while I've spent several days fishing on Oklahoma's Lake Eufaula, which is 825 miles from my North Georgia home, I've never fished a day on the nearer Lake Eufaula, which straddles the Georgia/Alabama border and is only 250 miles from here. Making it even more unusual that I've never fished the nearer Eufaula, it's one of the South's true classic bass fishing lakes and in fact is commonly called "the bass fishing capital of the world."

I've been there once to do a brief photo shoot and attend a tournament weigh-in, but I didn't fish at all and didn't actually even go out on the lake. So it's almost like I've never even been there.

I'm fixing that this week. I leave this afternoon, in fact, to drive four hours to Lakepoint State Park in Eufaula, Alabama. Today's plan includes arrival and settling in and then meeting and eating dinner with with other folks who are part of the trip, which is being hosted by the Alabama Bass Trail. Fishing begins tomorrow morning.

My understanding is that Eufaula is largely a structure lake, but I don't know a tremendous amount about how it fishes. With two and half days of fishing time planned this week, I look forward to learning much more about the fishing. I'm also looking forward to spending a bit of time in a boat with Aaron Martens and Russ Lane, neither of whom I've ever fished with before. Hopefully I will have some good fish stories to tell by Wednesday afternoon when I point the truck north again.

Another Big Step for Alabama Bass Trail

When you do something well enough, it's hard to NOT take it to the next level.

Just ask Kay Donaldson, program director of the Alabama Bass Trail. She has spent the last year and a half developing and promoting the trail, which was officially launched in spring 2012 and has quickly developed an enormous fan base for the 11 lakes and the trail itself and consequently has drawn major national attention to Alabama bass fishing. As the Alabama Bass Trail has grown in recognition, so has demand for a dedicated tournament series.

Eventually that demand reached a point where Donaldson and others involved with the Alabama Bass Trail had to think seriously about what such a series should look like, the audience it should target, how it could funded and much more. Exactly when those thoughts and accompanying talks started getting serious, I'm not certain; I do know that the end product, which was announced earlier this week and will be put into action early next year, is seriously impressive.

Ten regular-season events (five apiece for a northern and southern division) and a season-end championship collectively will hit each of the lakes on the Alabama Bass Trail once per season. With a guaranteed first prize of $10,000 per tournament and a pay-down 20 places down, these single-day amateur team events promise to have a huge draw from the Southeastern United States, and each one is expected to produce half a million dollars economic impact on its respective host city.

The championship, which is a no entry event with a 125-boat field built from top teams from both divisions and top student teams, will award a Phoenix 619 Pro and Mercury 150, complete with electronics and trolling motor and valued at $37,495.

Appropriately, the tournaments kick off at Lake Guntersville on Feb. 1. Guntersville stands as Alabama's most acclaimed bass lake and has attracted even more attention the normal in recent months as the host site of the next Bassmaster Classic. In fact, the 2014 Classic will visit Guntersville Feb. 21-23, only a few weeks after the inaugural Alabama Bass Trail Tournament Series event.

Visit the Alabama Bass Trail website to learn much more about the tournament series and to get outstanding information about the 11 lakes the make up the trail. And when you do fish one of the lakes on the trail, be sure to send in a picture of your big bass for Alabama Bass Trail followers to enjoy.

A Whole Lot of Catchin' Going On

For starter, I probably ought to ackowledge that I'm not talking about myself. If you happened to read yesterday's blog you know that my 2013 fish tally catipulted from zero to a whopping two yesterday afternoon. Fish story deadlines, rain and family plans have pretty well kept me off the water for the first few weeks of the year. That will change soon, but that's a different subject.

Today's social media madness makes it pretty easy to see when folks are catching fish, and the bass fishermen really have started to light up the boards. Lots of pictures of big largmouths, smallmouths and spots from bass waters all over the place. Like the Oklahoma tournament catch that's believed to hae been the biggest ever brought to the scales in that state; the school of giants Timmy Horton found while filming Timmy Horton Outdoors on Lake Seminole; a bunch of big bass being caught from stops along the Alabama Bass Trail...

I've been sharing many of these on the Jeff Samsel Fishing Facebook page, so be sure to visit and to like the page!

Some of this is attributable cabin fever. The first sunny weekends of the new year draw a lot of fishermen to the lakes, and simple math says that more fishermen fishing typically leads to more fish being caught. I think it's more than that, though. Those same first sunny days trigger a bit of movement among the biggest bass in the lakes, and they get into a mode of trying to store up calories for the spawn. The fish and their forage are still winter-slowed and won't be out chasing food everywhere, but if you can put the right bait in the right place, it's a fine time to catch a very big bass.

Alabama Bass Trail Up and Running

Lawrence Taylor of BOOYAH Bait Company delights in a Guntersville largemouth that walloped a YUM Money Hound Taylor had been walking across the Guntersville grass on a fall afternoon.

Alabama & largemouth bass are like cake & ice cream. They belong together. For evidence, you need not look any further than this year's Bassmaster Classic, where the top three finishers, six of the top 12, and nine contenders from the field of 49 were Alabama residents. And the fact that some of those, including champion Chris Lane, are Alabama transplants only adds to the case. Each chose Alabama as home for a career in bass fishing. Of course, B.A.S.S. itself recently chose to return home to Alabama!

Want more evidence? Last week, the Alabama governor's office announced the Alabama Bass Trail. A cooperative effort of Governor Robert Bentley's office, the Alabama Department of Tourism, the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and the Alabama Mountain Lakes Tourist Association, the trail highlights eleven of the state's stellar bass fisheries, with waters spread from Lake Guntersville to the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta.

The Alabama Bass Trail website includes pages about each of the 11 rivers and lakes, bringing together in a single place things like pro tips, guide service lists, lodging information, lake maps and fishing reports and making it very easy to plan a fishing trip anywhere in the state. The site also details tournaments and other events on each of the lakes. Along with promoting the state's bass fishing and providing information to anglers, the trail puts a major emphasis on conservation and education and will help fund and facilitate habitat-improvement projects on each of the lakes.

I've spent at least a little time on each of the eleven waterways (some far more than others), but I think I need to make a fresh effort to visit each stop along the trail The Alabama Bass Trail is new, but the traditions are longstanding, and it's exciting to see the state of Alabama's recognition of those traditions and desire to build on them.