Skeet’s Beat – Oh Rats, Hailstorms

I’m sitting in my room at Pickwick waiting for the weather to calm down.

We got severe weather warnings in the area and are anticipating tornados coming through the area this afternoon. So, instead of being out there practicing, I’m sitting in a hotel room waiting for high winds and golf ball sized hail to hit the area.

I guess it wouldn’t be a trip to Alabama without some kind of severe weather coming through.

The tournament at Pickwick this week is going to be interesting. Wilson Lock is broken, so we won’t be able to get to Wilson Lake until the third or fourth day of the event. What sucks is that I learned a lot about Wilson last year, and would have liked to give it a try this year; but with the lock being under maintenance, I won’t even be able to look at it until the third day of the event. Bay Springs and the other end of the lake are off limits to us too, so I think the lake is going to fish small.

The big decision will be choosing between smallmouth and largemouth. I think it’s going to take 18 pounds a day to finish high, and around 20 pounds a day to win, so whatever decision we make, it’s going to take some healthy sacks to win.

While those kinds of weights would usually mean fishing for largemouth; not on Pickwick, there’s been a couple of tournaments here lately that have been won with limits of smallmouth over 27 pounds.

We’ll just have to see how it shakes out, and how the weather affects the fish the rest of the week.

There was some excitement at home this week; Kim and the girls battled with rats. At first we thought it was some mice in the back yard near the barbeque, so we set some mouse traps out; but they didn’t work.

Our neighbor came over and said he thought it was a rat, so he set his rat trap out and put bacon in it as bait. Sure enough, they went out the next day to check it and it turned out to be a new breed of super rats that tipped the scales at like 100 pounds or something. Just kidding, they were 14 to 18 inches long, and when I showed a picture to someone on my phone and they said it looked more like a squirrel.

Our neighbor said he knew we had more, because while the one was lying dead in the trap, the bacon was missing. He re-baited and set the trap again and they caught the second one too. We’re waiting to see if there are any more, but we’ll have to see what happens.

Well, I guess I’ll go sit and wait for the storms to pass then get ready for another practice day tomorrow.

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