Cole Moore had a guide trip for bass with two fishermen this past Sunday, probably one of the last he’ll work this spring – because prime crappie fishing is right around the corner.
“I’ll guide for bass for another week, but I mostly guide for crappie,” said Moore, who runs CM2 guide service (337-397-2242) with partner Colby Miller. “It’s about to get real good. Around the first of April, they’ll get on brush piles and it will be wide open.”
Fortunately, one of his last guide trips worked out pretty well – if you consider an 11.92-pound, obviously post-spawn largemouth a success.
Moore boated the 28 ½-inch long, 20-inch girth fish around 10:30 a.m. on March 22, set up on a main-lake point in the mid-lake area.
“It had been a tough day before that; we weren’t getting a lot of bites, but when we got a bite, it was a pretty good fish,” said Moore, who was Texas-rigging a Zoom trick worm on a Shimano Expride rod and Shimano reel spooled with 12-pound fluorocarbon when he discovered a nice group of good fish on his forward-facing sonar.
The battle
Moore said he could see some big ones on the point in about 4 feet of water. He made a cast in the target area.
“The line got heavy, and then she started swimming off,” he said. “I got a good hookset.
“She never jumped, but she pulled pretty good. I figured she was a 10-pound fish by the way she was pulling. She ran around the boat a couple of times, then she came up on her side and I lipped her.
“I didn’t know exactly what she weighed until I put my hands on her; then, I knew she was over 11. I put her in the livewell, and we kept fishing for a couple more hours, trying to catch a few more.”
Moore, who counts a 12.01-pound Sam Rayburn monster as his personal best, finally headed to Buckeye Marina to get his big fish officially weighed, measured, tagged and released for the Toledo Bend Lunker Bass Program.
“I think she was post-spawn going back out,” he said. “She didn’t have any eggs left; I think she was getting ready to go offshore, but she hadn’t started to feed back up on big baits before she moved out.”
