Mike Accardo with his best brown to date. Beautiful 6 LB. hookjaw was released right after this photo. Congrats Buddy!
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I got a call from my buddy, Eric Cole, the other day. He was wondering if I wanted to join him and Mike Accardo for a trip to Wickiup for some bass action early and then chase browns later in the morning. I remembered the last time we went up there a couple of years ago and I actually caught my personal best largemouth at 7 LB. on that trip! That day we probably caught a dozen bass between the three of us from 3-7 LB. What really made it fun was that all the action was top water throwing 7 in. original A/C plugs......it was a blast! Not many people, with the exception of some locals and the bass heads, know that Wickiup has a strong population of largemouths that entered the lake from Crane Prairie several years ago.
He didn’t have to twist my arm so we agreed to meet at his house at 4:30 a.m. We had thunderstorms come through the evening before and some showers lingered into the morning as we drove up in the dark to Wickiup. The water at the ramp is still dropping but not quite as quickly as they are slowing the irrigation releases through Sept. We had no problems launching.
I won’t say exactly where we went but Eric has a good drill on where to find some big bass this time of year. It was not as good as our last trip but I think we caught a total of 5-6 bass with Eric’s 5 LB. chunk the best we landed. Mike did have a bigger one on that got off right at the boat. We all saw it and estimated it at around 7 LB.
We switched gears after the bite slowed and made the move to start trolling for browns around 9:00 a.m. We worked an area that has produced some nice browns in the last couple of weeks. As we were nearing a point, another buddy, Steve Kroll, was heading in our direction and we noticed his boat slowing down as he worked a nice brown to the boat. As we went by him my rod on the rigger went off. Right after I got it out of the holder, the brown got off. We took a photo for Steve and then proceeded to reset the rods and keep trolling. Eric said his dad, Allan Cole, was up for a few days and he called him to see where he was. Right after the call we saw him working his way up the channel.
It was a slow day on the browns though Allan got 4 and 6 LB. browns on the new version of his 9 in. stick bait. We ended up with a dink and then the 6 LB. hookjaw that Mike caught. Steve Kroll got a couple of smaller browns before he got off around noon. We hung around until mid-afternoon and then pulled out for the hour ride home.
I will be going back up to East soon and maybe back to Wickiup as long as I can get my boat in.
