Fishing Korea & Tennessee

Ooh, ooh that smell
Can’t you smell that smell?

Yesterday afternoon, a couple of us drove out to this lake about 45 minutes from Songtan to do some  fishing.  I’ve only fished this lake two times before this, so I don’t know much about it, like where the deep parts and points are, or what the bass usually hit on.  We started fishing at 4:30 and by 8:30, not one single bite.  Nothing.  Nada. Zip.  And between three of us, we tried just about everything in our repertoire, even a fly rod.  Not that it made us feel any better, but nobody else that was out fishing that lake caught anything the entire time we were there. Yes, I realize it happens to the best but this is the first time in a while I’ve gotten totally skunked (not even the hint of a bite), which only goes to reenforce (or is that reinforce?) my theory that if you have a good lake like Idong which is less than 15 minutes from my home and which I know pretty good, then stick with it instead of driving all over God’s green earth looking for better waters – although that too, has proven to pay off for others I know.

While Gar and company were down at Andong catching big bass, I finally got some free time on Monday to head out in the afternoon to do a little fishing myself.  After a weekend of moving, hanging curtains and pictures, I needed a few hours of peace and quiet to unwind and relax.  My friend Jim picked me up at 4:30 and 15 minutes later, were at Idong lake.  Just like that.  While Jim got busy catching bass, I grabbed my trusty ultralight rod and walked the bank in pursuit of bluegill.

This was my biggest bluegill of the afternoon and I caught it on a small Rapala Shad Rap right at dusk, which was the time the fish began biting in earnest.  This fish fought so hard that I was sure I had hooked into at least a one-pound bass.  And once again, this is the biggest bluegill I’ve caught to date.  On another note, I need to get into dropshot fishing because there were a couple of Koreans out there who caught over 20 bass, all between one and two pounds, in less than two hours using a dropshot rig with a green worm.  That impressed the heck out of me.

I wasn’t sure how it was going to work out down there at Andong because of the weather. It rained a lot, but we had a blast anyway. A few of us got down there early for the practice-fishing, and it rained like hell all morning. If you’ve never been hit in the face with rain while going 70 mph on a bass boat, let me tell you, it hurts! We caught some nice fish on Saturday, and worms seemed to be the trick. I lost a fish on a spinner bait when it snapped my line and another on a topwater when the fish spit it out after a brief drag-ripping bout. We ended up catching about four 3 lb bass and some smaller ones. Mr. Pak did a lot of dicking around with his tackle while we drifted out to the middle of the lake. I couldn’t cast to anything so I just had to wait and be patient. He spent a lot of time talking with his buds out in the middle of the lake too, but other than that it was fun.

Sunday was a different story… my partner, Mr. Im Mu-Tek, a no-bullshit professional, hell-of-a-nice-guy, and friend of Mr. Yeom’s landed a 6 lb bass within the first 5 minutes using a wacky-worm. 10 minutes later he landed a 4 pound-plus. He hooked me up with some hardware and showed me how to rig it with a weight in the head, but I never caught any on them all day. We did, however, notice something spooking the bluegill at the end of a cove. I tossed in a topwater popper, twitched it a couple of times, and a 4 pound bass inhaled it! We couldn’t believe it. We had at least 14 lbs of bass in the live-well and hadn’t even been fishing 30 minutes. I picked up a small 2 lb’r again on a topwater plug and that was it for the day. Bummer. We took 5th place and I finally got to stand on the big podium in front of my friends. We missed 1st place by 600 grams. Not bad for not having a limit. Im received some money, and I received a nice trophy and a $200 NS-BlackHole Shot Gun spinning rod. I had a great time. It was good to see some of the same folks from last year’s tournament. We made some new friends, learned some new techniques, caught some nice fish, barbequed a bunch of food, and drank a lot of beer up at Halmoni’s house. It doesn’t get much better than that.