Fishing Korea & Tennessee

I hope all you guys up on the North and West areas are all safe in this typhoon!! Luckily we didn’t get hit too hard on this South East coast!!

Anyway, there was no chance I was going fishing this weekend so I got to play with some baits. I added some parts to my favorite SureCatch spinnerbaits. 1) a snap/swivel for fast blade changes on the water without having to retie on a new bait, and 2) an idea from a UB.com member, to add some thin wire to the “R” bend of the spinnerbait so I can use a snap with spinnerbaits for fast changing of the entire spinnerbait without having to retie every time.

Blade changing mod….

Line tie mod….

My wife, daughter and I visited the guys fishing the KSA team walking tournament at HapCheon Lake. We arrived there late and missed all the fish being weighed in, but we had just enough time for my wife and daughter to have a few casts before having some food with the KSA guys. Well, between my 2 girls my daughter caught the only fish and it wasn’t a bass and it was a first for me.

A freshwater tarpon (that she didn’t want to touch, lol).

After that we headed up to where all the KSA guys were and had dinner and watched the final ceremony and prize giving. There was a good turn out.

I hope I’ll be bass fishing next week…..it’s been tooooooo long!

For me they don’t happen very often, but when they do it’s a great day…..I’m talking about catching bass on JIGS consistently. Today was one of those days, I met a few of my Korean friends and we fished a new-to-me river, which the boat ramp is only 45 minutes from my home!

I was there at 5:30am and had 2 bass before the other guys showed up.

Once everyone was ready to go, we headed South to where there are a bunch of makeshift docks along the river bank and I started throwing jigs under the docks. After just a few pitches I felt the “TAP” and I set the hook. This went on consistently for the whole time we were fishing, even when the wind got strong, they kept biting. All together I caught 14 bass and missed and lost a bunch more that would of taken my limit to over 20, and 2 of the lost bass were a decent size.

This one was the longest I caught all day, but it was also the skinniest with some big scars.

I was using a SureCatch rubber jig (with rubber skirt, not silicone). This jig is no longer available and I only have 3 or 4 left, so I’m be very careful where I throw them. For the trailer I was using a SureCatch Hyper Fly in Junebug/purple color. Here what the Hyper Fly looks like.

I also continued the break-in period on my new motor. Today was the first time I wound this little 15hp motor up to full throttle, and let me tell you, my little 12 foot boat glides across the water at a pretty decent speed

For anyone wanting to fish in the Andong International Pro/Am tournament on June 12th, please follow these instructions.

Fax your NAME and SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER to KSA at the following fax number – 02-777-3736

Let me know here if anyone needs any other info.

This Challenger tournament held on May 22nd was was open tournament where anyone with a boat could compete. I’m still waiting on the exact numbers of entrants, but it was a good turn out. There was also 2 Pro/Am tournaments held over the weekend, Saturday and Sunday.

SATURDAY.

This was the first Pro/Am event where a bunch of university students fished with a pro for a few hours I didn’t get to see the results as I was too busy practicing for the Sunday Open tournament in the rain!! (this appears to be a pattern this year at Andong – heavy rain on Saturday).

Andong is rather good condition regardless of the heavy rains we had last week. The water level was up at least 20 feet from 3 weeks ago and the water was still stained (which I prefer over the usual clear water. Most of the bass had already spawned and the water temps were between 69~71 degrees. I found an area that held some bass so I left and went to Halmony’s to get dried off. Here’s Saturday’s bass.

Saturday evening was a KSA dinner party to welcome Nitro/Mercury (Singapore) as a KSA sponsor. It was a good turn out with good food and good people. They had a new Nitro Z6 display boat with them (very nice I must say!!).

SUNDAY.

I was hoping hoping for good cloudy weather for tournament day, and it started out that way, but the day started less than good! My second trolling motor on the back of the boat started vibrating like crazy, and when I checked it out I found I had lost one of the prop blades, so I had to fish the rest of the tournament with just one trolling motor. By now, all the other boats were well ahead of me, so I was playing catch up, but those light weight flat bottomed inflatables can move pretty fast.

I made a long run (it seems long when only using one trolling motor) and luckily the first spot I wanted to fish was not occupied. I quickly caught 3 bass in that cove within 45 minutes. Then the sun came out and the bites dried up. I tried to find more bass as one of my fish was just within the limit size, but it was not until after 12 noon when I caught another bass, but I then caught 3 more in total within about 30 minutes to cull 3 bass. I was feeling good at this point, but my livewell pump went out on me so I headed back early (changing the livewell water regularly).

I finished in 8th place with 3,485 grams, Here’s my fish!.

I fished on a local river north of Busan on Sunday with a few friends. My main reason was to test out and start the break-in of my brand new 15hp motor I bought last week.

We fished from around 7:30am until around 14:00pm. This river generally has no current and the water level is always the same, but when I arrived there, the water was at least 10 inches higher than normal from all the rain that fell last week and the water was very stained, but clearing up a little. The boat ramp was also still very boggy from the rains, but somehow I was able to get the boat in and out again without any major issues.

The fishing started off great, I caught a nice 14 inched on almost the first cast, then I caught 3 more (dinks) shortly after. Then the sun came out in full force and it got very hot with very little wind to cool things down (weather forecast was calling for a cloudy day!!).

I then went a couple of hours before catching this dink (smallest of the day).

Then we all (6 guys in 4 boats) gathered together for a kimbab lunch and put my boat deck to good use as a lunch table, lol.

Then I took a long run with my new motor and fished around an island near the main river. I was throwing a Fat Ika around some overhanging trees and some old abandoned nets. One bass grabbed the Fat Ika and ran to the right of me, and by the time I had taken up the slack line I had missed the hook set. It turns out that these fat ika’s simply don’t have clearance to move away from the hook point, even using a 5/0 EWG hook!! So now I need to go shopping for some of the thinner “Big Ika’s” to help with GY mortgage payments, lol.

Right after missing that Ika bass, I caught this decent little bass on a spinnerbait before heading back to the ramp and calling it a day.

All bass today were caught on spinnerbaits, either all chartreuse or a white/black colors.

Sometime during us starting fishing and finishing, somebody must of opened the flood gates down stream, because there was suddenly a pretty strong current and the water had dropped at least 6 inches from when we had started!!

I fished with my bass club on Sunday morning and it turned out to be a beautiful morning on the water with a bunch of bass caught. I didn’t catch anything huge, but all bass were between 12 and 14 inches and put up a great fight in the 68 degree water.

All day Saturday was spent in my basement car park adding and repairing some items on my boat and trailer. I added some broken battery trays and added a winching eye as the last one was not lined up for my new trailer and it started cracking. I also added some mud flaps and side guide rollers to the trailer to help with loading the boat especially at some of the crappy ramps I use.

Before and after winching eye.

Battery trays, mud flaps and side rollers.

I wasn’t planning on fishing this weekend as I was supposed to be on baby sitting duties on Sunday whilst me wife was busy, but things changed and I was able to hit the local river. It was a day of just fishing for fun with no tournament pressure. The wife was doing her thing ALL day so I was fishing ALL day  . I was on the water at 8:30am and finished around 4:30pm. The morning was by far the best time, there was no wind and the water was like glass and best of all the bass were biting. I had about 10 bass in the first couple of hours. There were all mostly 10 ~ 12 inch bass but in the warm water (58~60 degrees) they were very active and put up a good fight.

The above bass were all caught near the ramp area and there seemed to be plenty of them, so I decided to leave them alone and try some new water. Well, not sure if the bass were not in the other spots I tried or if they just shut down as the sun got higher and the air temperatures went up significantly but I only managed 2 or 3 more dinks over a few hours. As the day was coming to an end the wind got really strong and there were even white caps on this small river which made maneuvering my little boat a little tougher, but I did manage to catch a few more bass that were holding close to shallow structure in about 3 and 4 feet of water. Here’s the biggest of the day, and 2lb 5oz 42cm bass.

During the day I tried wacky rigged senkos, neko rigs, texas rigged hogs (SureCatch MP Hunter) pitched into the over hanging trees and spinnerbaits and as you can tell by the photos, ALL the bass were caught on spinnerbaits only! I tried 2 different colors (orange/white and full chartreuse) and both caught bass equally well. I did have 3 bites on the hogs but I was not concentrating and I missed all 3.

Anyway, it was a great day with a total of 17 bass boated

I got to fish a local tournament here yesterday. It was held on the same river that I caught that nice bass (my new PB) on last weekend. There was 76 anglers in the tournament including me, but a lot of these guys were fishing in teams, 2 per boat. There was probably over 50 boats on this small river.

This tournament was a 5 fish limit with a minimum keeper size of 25cm.

The day started of great, I had a 35cm bass in the live-well within the first 5 minutes that I caught on a purple jig. 10 minutes later I had a fish take my Flex jig, but it threw the jig on the way to the boat It then went quiet for almost 2 hours. Then I went to the concrete bridge where I caught my big bass last week and with a few casts with my chartreuse spinnerbait it felt like I had got snagged on something, then suddenly the “snag” started moving. It was another huge bass well over 50cm. I got it in the net as quick as possible (so I didn’t lose it and to reduce the stress on this great bass). After that bass I quickly caught another 3 small 12 inch bass to get my limit to 5 in the live-well with still 2 hours spare. So I went to a spot with overhanging trees to flip my jigs to try and find some bigger bass to cull the smaller ones, but it wasn’t to be. I did eventually catch one more on a spinnerbait to cull one bass. I quickly went to the scales at 13:00 with my limit.Someone took some photos of my bass at the weigh area, but unfortunately I don’t have them yet, but here’s the one that I culled (smallest of the day).

After the weigh-in, there was an agonizing weight for the results. Then as they called my name out for 3rd place!!!!! I got a trophy, a small envolope with some $$$ inside and a rod donated by JSCompany, a big Korean rod company that works with Gary Dobyns’s rod company in the States. The best part of the day was that Gary Dobyns himself was there at this event and he presented me with my prize. I also got to speak with him for quite sometime. He is a very nice guy, top notch!!

Gary even autographed my 3rd place trophy.

Hopefully I will have some photos of my bass soon and I will add them here. I hope this is the start of a good tournament and fishing year.

Here it is, the first bass Scott has ever caught in Korea, I’m willing to bet it won’t be anywhere near the last!

Message from Scott….

Steve, here a few pictures from last weekend.  I must say, they’re not big, but I was just excited to get into fish for the first time in months!  Feel free to throw them up on the site! I also included one with my friend Sugon’s lunker as well!
The first one is my first bass in Korea, the 2nd is my second bass (both on drop-shot spinning tackle) and the 3rd one is the first on the fly. 

The last is the picture with my buddy’s lunker!

Hope to have more pictures to throw up there after the weekend.
Headed out again Saturday!
-Scott

Here’s another 3 items from SureCatch, and all 3 products will be available in April.

1. First up is a new low profile bait-casting reel called the 2011 “Oldboy”. It will be available in both left and right hand models, a 6.2:1 ratio and it has an external magnetic brakes system. Keep checking by the SureCatch website for more info.

2. Next is a new soft plastic bait called the “Long Tail”. It comes in at 175mm/7 inch length that can be fished anyway you desire, but I believe it would be best suited as a drop shot rig bait nose hooked. It will be available in 9 different colors.

3. And last but not least is the new Ultra Rubber Jig with built in curly tail trailer. It will be available in weight of 3/8oz and 1/2oz and a choice of 6 colors.

Checkout www.surecatch.co.kr in the “coming new products” section for more details!

Over this past weekend March 11th ~ 13th the annual Korean fishing show (expo) KOFISH was held at the Busan Bexco exhibition center. Due to my new job and personal commitments, I was only able to attend for one of the 3 days. I was there at opening time on Sunday morning and stayed there until they kicked me out at 5:00pm, lol. There were tons of booths with some great looking products (and pretty girls ).

KSA had a good sized area of the place where they had a long swimming pool setup and a Champion bass boat set up at one end of the pool. There was about 12 bass in the pool that someone had caught from the local river on Saturday as well as hundreds of small gold fish that were eventually all netted out by all the kids at the show.

I got to meet Scott in person after chatting with him a few times here at the blog, but unfortunately we didn’t get much of a chance to talk for long. KSA asked forced me to stand on the Champion’s casting deck and do some casting/lure demos for the folks at the show. That was kind of interesting and fun all at the same time, a great experience.

There was plenty of other things to see at the show, unfortunately I didn’t take many photos of things, but I did take a few.

This is a boat tournament held on the Busan area Nakdong river on Sunday March 6th. Here’s the flyer for the tournament in Korean. If anyone is interested I can try and get more info.

There are 4 new items (so far) joining the SureCatch product line up for 2011. All of these will be available through the SureCatch website starting in April.

1. Buzzing Hawg: This soft plastic bait can be fished Texas Rigged (weighted or weightless). Fished weightless, it can be used as a topwater lure. It could also be used as a Spinnerbait or Jig trailer. I’ll be using these as a jig trailer They will be available in 6 different colors.

2. Alpha Trio: This is a jointed hard topwater/wakebait. It has a lip that allows it to wake across the water surface and the 3 jointed body sections give this lure a life-like swimming action. This lure is also available in 6 different colors and will be available in April.

3. Alpha Fantom: This again is a hard topwater bait. The Fantom is a straight stick bait style lure (similar in design to a Zara Spook). This type of bait is great for the “Walking-the-Dog” retrieves that works so well during the summer months when the bass are actively feeding at or new the surface. Again, this bait is available in 6 colors and will be available for sale in April.

4. MoMo: Here’s another great topwater lure. It is a hollow body floating lure with a froggy design with 2 forward facing appendages that give this lure a great “Walk-the-Dog” action. The single hook sit on top of the frog in a weedless way that will allow you to fish this lure through some thick grass (where those summer bass love to hide) with ease. This lure is available in 9 different colors and again will be available through the SureCatch website in April.

For more information on these lures including a short video of each, go to www.surecatch.co.kr and click on – 출시예정제품