We have only a week or so left in this month, but turkey season will have been in for over a week when the end of the month does near.

And a good 10 days we had this time.

The extended cold we had this year has held off the breeding, or gobbling, season this year and rather than starting slowly, it was gang busters when it did start.

Some folks that live at the edge of town can most probably hear the gobblers sounding off in the early morning. If the folks that work at the town square hear the gobblers talking while going to work, we are over run with the big boys. Don’t worry, that won’t happen. Our hunters are too good.

I can remember in the past putting in at Faceville Landing and going up river. There was a bunch of turkeys in that stretch of land that folks would try their luck with. I understand that they could hunt on the government land with a wildlife stamp and be fairly legal.

If there were no turkeys where you set up, it would be hard to call them to you because you were not able to move that far with the water and boggy areas on the government land.

I never saw one person do it, but a really good turkey caller could call them from a good ways off and get his bird. Some of the old turkey hunters might have been good enough to call one across the river, but I don’t know of one. It is possible, however, as we have had some very good turkey callers here in Southwest Georgia.

We have had a few hunters to admit, or brag, to calling a gobbler away from a hen. If you are able to talk a big ole gobbler into leaving a sure thing to come in search of something else, hopefully, you are a extremely good turkey caller or you have just run into the dumbest gobbler in the woods. I don’t know, but one that stupid probably would not taste all that good. Now is your chance to get that gobbler and have some of that fried turkey breast.

At the moment that those hunters were trying to coaxing in a gobbler along the river, we were casting a plug or soft plastic lure trying to get a big ole bass in the boat.

Every now and then up the river a big one would try to make off with a desirable bait and sometimes she did. More times than not she came to the boat and got looked over, weighed and released. If she had known the outcome she would have fought less and got that trying experience over with in a hurry.

When you are fishing up either the Chattahoochee or Flint rivers, the water is usually not as clear as it is in the lake or Spring Creek. The bass coming from the clearer water will be darker than the ones coming from either of the rivers.

When you are looking at a fisherman’s stringer of fish and tell him where he caught them in general terms, he will think you are spying on him. Of course you are not, but some folks don’t understand that this is camouflage for the fish. It makes them harder to see in the water and then they can sneak up on their food and get it without being detected.

In just a few days the water will be warm enough for the bass to bed over most of the shallows in the lake. The clear water in the back ponds and on the creek will be first because the shallow clear water warms first, especially if the bottom is sandy. The white sand reflects the sunlight, and thus warmth, back up through the water warming it quicker than if the bottom is darker and absorbs the heat. Even that helps to an extent, but not like reflecting the heat back through the water. That sunlight warms the water as it goes toward the bottom and then on the way back up after it is reflected. That is in the very simplest terms.

Now with some sunshine and a little less wind, we can have a comfortable time fishing. When we were younger it didn’t matter what the conditions were, we went fishing. At this older stage of our lives it is much easier to put off the fishing trip and await a better day. At my age a better day for me is almost a perfect one. I told someone this past week that if I never caught another fish, I am probably going to hell for all I have caught.