On the first day of March the weather folks had predicted snow for south Georgia.

South Georgia covers a lot of territory, so we here in the very southern most part of the region should have not expected to get any snow. It boiled down to having two chances, little and none. We got none, which is what we really wanted, though the youngsters would have loved playing in it.

But, alas, we didn’t get any snow, that I saw anyway. Now my sister swears that she did see one snowflake pass through her yard. And it could have. It wouldn’t surprise me if it did snow on us in the upper elevations, just melted coming down when it hit the warmer air close to the surface here in Southwest Georgia.

You didn’t have to go very far to our north, however, to see signs of snow. It wasn’t sticking in the southern areas, but closer to the middle part of the state it did stick. Folks in Columbus said that some areas there got just over six inches of snow. Of course the numbers got smaller and lighter as one would move south.

On the way back I checked with my friend in Americus, and he said they got just the right kind of snow fall for him. It snowed really good for Americus, Ga., and hung around for about two hours and was gone. That gave the kids time to play in the snow, but also go away so the roads would be safe for travel. You can put off going anywhere for two hours except, maybe, the hospital or maybe bathroom. But they didn’t have any major happenings and everything got back to normal really quickly. So the predicted snow event for us turned out to be a non-event, which was and is a good thing.

I know that we have had a colder winter than we are used to having here in the deep south, but it hasn’t deterred the fish from biting.

Local fishermen as well as out-of-town visitors have been taking limits of bass and, thankfully, returning most of them back to the water. They are getting ready to bed and a caught fish won’t lay eggs while a released one might have a chance to go through the bedding process. Other species are also bedding now or will be in the next few weeks and the more eggs that are laid, the better chance we have of coming out of this spring with a good hatch.

Crappie have been biting pretty good. At lot of them have been caught in the shallows as they are trying to bed. As they finish bedding they will gather in schools in the deeper water and start feeding in an effort to gain back the weight that they lost during the bedding time. That goes for all fish.

Often times we will see some dead fish, this time of year and a little later, floating and starting to decay. These fish have stressed themselves out bedding and were not strong enough to survive the experience.

The fish that are going to move upstream to bed are doing so. The folks in Albany are catching some good fish below the small dam there. Same way on the Hooch. Our fish from this lake are moving to the first dam there and are being caught. There is no law that says that you can’t go up there and get a limit. So go on.