Fishing Korea & Tennessee

Got these pics and write-up from Tex Mex:

Went out to Andong with Tony Rodriguez on 1-2 Sep for two days of fishing at Andong. We were supposed to be there for 3 days but Tony was only able to get out of the dog house for a 2 day trip.  We got there at about 1000 and only fished for several hours as it was extremely hot.  We came back later in the evening and fished until night and ended up with about 10 fish for the day. I caught the largest fish of the day on the very last cast while it was dark. The next morning was supposed to be us at the lake in the boat by 0500 but ended up being 0700 as we divulged the night before on a meal of BBQ pork guts and massive amounts of cold beverages. It’s usually what happens when Momma gives you a hall pass. Day two was strange as we did not even get a bite until the sun came out and it started getting hot.  We caught about 10 in about one hour, all on wacky style robo worms. I also caught my very first sogari, which Tony did not take a picture of. We took a break and came back at about 1600 and fished from the banks as it was way too hot to get on the inflatable boat. We started casting heavy texas rigged 10 inch ribbontail worms as far as we could and caught several more to include 3 that went over 3 pounds. The water was the highest I have ever seen it at and there were trucks and tractors all over the boat launch area cleaning mountains of trash and wood debris. Next trip is Pusan for Amberjacks with maybe a trip or two or three to the Pyongtaek river in between.

Rob and I headed out to Dae Ho Man this last Monday and rented one of their inflatables and even though the fishing was tough, I must say that I had a good old time.  Here are some of the pics that Rob took:

First of all, Dae Ho Man is pretty darned big and it was a little intimidating to fish a body of water that large without knowing where to fish.  Add to that that there’s no cover or structure, nothing but flat shoreline with no or little rocks/brush/trees, a high pressure system which gave us blue skies with lots of sun plus the water being green from the algae growth, and you have a challenge, to say the least.  Without a fish finder, we also had no way to know how deep the water was or what the bottom looked like beneath us so we sort of stuck close to the bank, fishing the hydrilla we saw floating near shore.  That produced lots of dinks, mostly on Senkos fished wacky (Rob did really well with the baby bass color).  I did manage to catch that one bass in the last pic on a jig (jigs, baby!) when I cast out near a weed bed and Rob caught one about the same size on a Senko which he didn’t take a pic of.  I think had the water been clearer so we could see where the weed beds were, we could have done a lot better but the algae growth had turned the water a greenish color and that hampered our fishing.  IMO, Dae Ho would be great during the spring when the water is clear and you can see the weed beds but right now it’s a tough lake to fish unless you know exactly where to go and what to use, which we didn’t.  But, as always, we had a great time and I’m glad I finally had the chance to fish there and  I’m looking forward to some fishing reports from next spring.  Thanks, Rob!

If any of you are wondering what Idong looks like right now, here you are:

It’s not looking good; as you can see the lake is super high, frozen solid from shore to shore and the ice is also still very thick in most places.  I picked up a couple of large rocks which weighed at least a pound or more and lobbed them as high as I could and they barely put a dent in the ice on landing.  My guess is; at least 2 more weeks for a thaw and then another couple of weeks before the water warms up enough for the fish to start getting active.  Hopefully I’m wrong and it’ll be sooner than that but judging by the amount and thickness of that ice, it’ll be a while yet.

I received this email and pics from Ty, who is currently down at Kunsan fishing working.

I fished Kunsan yesterday and as you see they were hitting all baits. I got a chance to use those jigs you gave me. The first pic was a good size, and caught on the bitsy bug jig with a trailer. The bass kept hitting it then I lost the trailer and didn’t have any more and finally lost the jig in the rocks. It’s much easier fishing in a boat cause you can retrieve the jigs. I switched to a green senko with gold flakes and caught a couple. I decided to fish the brown jig without a trailer and didn’t have many hits but did land one until that one was lost in the rocks. I put on my spinner bait and
caught three on it and the wind really picked up so it was time to go. That spinner is the same spinner I caught the 4 pounder on at the river Sunday. All in all it was a good couple hours fishing. I ended up with 9 bass and a few misses.

And he had another couple of great days:

From Ty:

I fished this lake Tuesday evening and Wednesday evening. I caught 16 on Tuesday, but only had two nice ones. I caught 24 on Wednesday with four
being nice and worthy of a camera shot. The first two pics are bass from Tuesday evening, the other ones are from Wednesday.

From Ty:  “Me and Jim went to Asan Bay Yesterday afternoon. We caught 11 total. Jim had 6 and I ended with 5. We put on our waders and managed to fish between the carp boats out there and did pretty good. We caught the eight at our favorite spot, Jim kept the small ones and threw back the big ones. We moved to another spot and caught three more there and ended our afternoon fishing.”

From Ty: “Here are the pics from Kunsan. I caught 22 the first day and 25 the next night. Most were dinks but it was a fun time fishing. These pics are the better ones caught on both days. Most were caught on 4" knockoff senko’s. The second night I fished using a blue and silver crank bait and the bass loved that bait.”

I took a day leave today so that my friend Ty and I could take my boat out on her maiden voyage and I spent last night packing up the car with everything; boat, boat bag, battery, trolling motor, fish finder, seat, tackle bag, rods – you get the idea.

Above are a couple of pics of the car with everything piled in – it’s not as bad as I thought it would be and I still had plenty of room for more stuff (not that I want to lug more stuff around ). 

Now, let’s get to the boat itself.  It didn’t take long at all for Ty and myself to get everything set up; I think we were totally ready to launch about 15 minutes after we arrived at the river.  Here she is, the S.S. Netcutter:

I put the seat up front for Ty, since I was going to be manning the trolling motor and fish finder in the back.  I’ll have to say, there was plenty of room for the two of us, we were both comfortable with being able to cast when and how we wanted and neither one of us ever felt crowded one bit.  Of course, we did keep an eye out when making casts so that the other person wasn’t directly behind us but other than that, no problems.  And I’m glad I bought the 55 pound thrust trolling motor; we were scooting around pretty nice and at a good clip and I had the motor on full throttle quite a bit and the battery is still over 50% charged.  I know, I know, you’re thinking “that’s all real nice, but did you guys catch any fish?”  I’m glad you asked!
Continue reading ‘The Maiden Voyage of the S.S. Netcutter’ »

Got this from a long-lost friend of mine yesterday:

I had some time off in the middle of the week and woke up around 5 and said to myself "Self, you haven’t been fishing in a while!" so I headed off to Ildong with the intent on finding some bluegill. I started at the other cove because of all the growth that occurred while the lake was down. It was about 0620 and still a bit to early for the bluegill so I tied a red # 4 Sneaky Pete on my 6wt fly rod and thought I would see if there where any small bass roaming around in all those weeds. After a few casts I landed a good little fighter that looked to be about 12 inches, I was in my waders and all I had was my phone cam so I just let him go. I caught another one slightly bigger about 15 minutes later and then…while I wasn’t paying attention one hit that ole Sneaky Pete.

I got the rod tip up and set the hook and could feel him going thought the weeds so I let him take out some line (I love fishing with a light wt. fly rod). So after about 10 minutes of playing with him I finally got up close enough to get a look at him and my jaw dropped. He looked big. I finally got him up to the surface and was well rewarded, I’ll let the pictures tell the rest. I had to keep him and he did taste good. (Oh, I did catch some bluegill there as well but then the Ski boat started running and my surface stuff stopped working.
Tight lines….

Although I know better, I keep going back to this lake for some reason; maybe I’m a glutton for punishment, LOL.  I was off work today, so this morning I drove out to Idong to see if I could change my luck – I know there are still some decent fish in that lake.  I got there early enough to get set up and watch another nice sunrise:

Idong is such a scenic lake, and relatively clean so it’s always a pleasure to fish here.  I do catch a lot more and bigger bass in the river, but that river is a cesspool; the water is dirty, the shores are littered with garbage (and that’s not counting all the garbage floating in the water) and it even smells bad at times so even though I don’t catch the same quality/quantity fish out of Idong (anymore), I do love coming out here just for the scenery.  Oh, and unlike the river, Idong isn’t shoulder to shoulder with carp fishermen either

I did a double take when I saw the above boat; that’s the first time I’ve ever seen anything like that in this lake and have no idea what it’s doing tied off to the cliffs.

Oh you want to hear about the fishing, right?  I caught well over 20 bass today, but aside from two of them, they were all dinks (and the 2nd biggest wasn’t far removed from dink-hood).

The bass in the 3rd pic is one of the ones I caught (on a small chatterbait) while trying for bluegill.  I must have walked a good 1/2 mile or more using a rooster tail, mepps spinner and small chatterbait, just trying to catch one single bluegill but it was not to be.  Rob was out there with me about 2 years ago when I walked the shore with a white rooster tail and caught over 60 slab-sized bluegill…no idea what happened since then.  The last two pics are about the average size fish I caught today.

The water in Idong is low, but not low enough for me to walk on shore around the cliffs you see in the picture of that big boat above; so instead, I had to walk what we call “the hill of death” – you can’t really tell from this pic, but it’s pretty high and steep as well and if you go up with your fishing gear, you’ll know how healthy your heart is once you get to the top.

Here are a couple of pics (and a panorama) of the cove in it’s present state; as you can see the water has dropped quite a bit since the last time I was out there.  This morning I tried spinnerbaits, chatterbaits, a jig (which got snagged and is now gone ), Senkos and Neko rigs (for bass, that is).  The only thing I caught bass on (not counting the small chatterbait) were Senkos and Neko rigs (thanks, Steve), which I started using once the Senko bite started slowing down.  Will I fish Idong again?  Yeah I will and I know it, despite the drop in the bass and bluegill populations.  It’s a beautiful (and clean!) lake, it’s only 15 minutes from my house and these days, very few, if any people are coming to the spots that I like to fish.  Peace and quiet, a nice sunrise and if I’m lucky, a few fish to boot.  Can’t ask for much more than that.

I’m posting this for Ty, who had a couple of really good days down at Kunsan (I edited this post and added some more pics…apparently the other emails Ty sent me earlier didn’t make it through so he brought them over on a thumb drive):
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I started fishing around 4:40 in the afternoon on the 19th at this Kunsan lake and fished till about 6:45. You wouldn’t believe this lake, I caught 13 that evening and missed about 5. I was itching the next day to get back out there but had a lot of work to do as I only get to visit Kunsan once a month TDY. (Yeah that sucks-not anymore now that I know where to fish) So later that evening on the 20th the itch was gone because I was out there again about 4:45 and fished till 7 and it was the best – I caught 15 and missed 10. The one bass I caught had a hook sticking out of his gill, maybe that was the big one I missed the night before – yeah that one jumped twice and laughed at me and then got into some weeds and then said “bye” to me. Hey this was yet the best fishing I’ve done in about 3 years. Enjoy the pics!
Continue reading ‘Ty Does Kunsan’ »