By LT Burnette
I honestly had not fished in 3 weeks so I was going purely on history. Pulled into a creek in the middle section of the Roanoke side first thing and started with a jerkbait and crankbait. I’ve been hearing that the Alabama rig was the deal lately so buying into the dock talk after going 20 minutes without a bite, I picked it up and started tossing it around some laydowns. (I have Livescope but haven’t really spent enough time with it yet to know exactly what I am looking at. The one thing I was able to determine though was the bank I was fishing had a lot of bait and fish moving up and down it, but they looked big and most likely stripers). There were two laydowns on the bank in front of me and I tossed the A-rig between them and she bit. I thought it was a striper at first but to my surprise it was a largemouth. Once we got her in the net, I knew she was big but no idea how big until she rolled on her side. I weighed her, then after seeing that weight I tared (zeroed) it again and both times it hit 9.40 lbs. She couldn’t have been deeper than 5 or 6 feet as she bit pretty quickly after the A Rig hit the water. That was my only bite on the A Rig all day. My nonboater caught a keeper on a crankbait finally around 0930 so in an effort to not be the “one bite all day but it was the right one” guy at the weigh-in, I literally turned the graphs off and we cranked for the last 5 hours of the day and it paid off with some nice quality fish to make it a day I’ll never forget.
