How many of you are sitting there saying “Well, summer is over, and football is about to start.”

Be honest. You are probably the same ones excited about pumpkin spice lattes and wearing Ugg boots.

Well, I hate to tell you this, but a Georgia summer doesn’t ever really end. It only has breaks. This week we will experience 100 degree-plus weather. Yep. That’s Georgia in August. As I sit and write this, I have my favorite bass fishing YouTube channel running, and they are discussing top baits for August.

You know what mine are?

Anything that they bite after 7 p.m. and before 8 a.m. Folks, I still ain’t fishing the middle of the day or the mornings or afternoons with this weather. So not to argue with them but my favorite bass baits are top water things like Zara Spooks, pop’r, flukes rigged weightless, and of course, lipless cranks like Rat-L-Traps and the like. I like to fish the time right before daylight till about an hour after and somewhere around the two hours before dark till about half an hour after sunset. So real dark not sunset.

Now, with that being said, fish are being caught all day long. I spoke with Mark Smith of Reeltime GuideServices and Capt. Kevin Wahl of Wildside Fishing, and both are having tons of luck trolling mini Macks down around the dam for stripers and hybrids. Now this is new territory for all of us. Typically, by the first of July our stripers have left the main lake and are up in the river looking for oxygen and cooler water. Since the addition of the oxygen system by Southern Company, though, these fish are staying in the lake. The general thoughts are they are staying below RiverBend on the main lake, and in Richland Creek. If you aren’t sure what we are talking about, well the short version is they have added an aquarium bubbler system to the lake to provide dissolved oxygen to run through the dam.

Now, some new readers may ask what is a Mini-Mack? Well, either go to Sugar Creek Marina and ask William to sell you some or go to Captmacks.com and purchase them from the man, the myth, the legend himself, Capt. Mack Farr. These are heavier duty Alabama rigs, a multi-arm bait with jig heads and swim baits on it. We troll these behind our boats and varying speeds (in the winter I run my trolling motor mostly and the rest of the year I run my main engine because they seem to not mind the faster speed). Mark Smith is running his on-lead core line and his length depends on where he is locating fish. Kevin is using deep planers and a system we learned from Capt. Brandon Davis where he uses a planer diver to get his depth. The key to this is getting down to the fish. They are staging right around the oxygen lines. Sometimes right on top of them but, more often than not, they are just around the lines. Use your electronics and pay attention to the depth and any structure.

Now the good news is this: We only have about another month of 100-degree weather to go! Then it’ll just get hot for a while.

Tight lines and following seas y’all!