My dad and I decided to drive from Winston and give Randleman a try since I've heard so many good things about it. After doing some research last night using Google Earth and Bing Maps to find some places, I felt pretty good about our chances. Long story short, we only caught 1 bass and 1 crappie. We lost a few we had on, but they were small dinks anyway. We threw everything but the kitchen sink at 'em and couldn't get a bite. We tried fishing protected coves that were relatively flat, coves that had some good depth changes, coves with lots of cover, banks along the main parts of the lake, bridge pilings, rip rap. Basically everything except structure in open water. We saw a few fish on the beds, so they must be spawning now.

Here's the funny thing, we thought it might be because the drastic temp change and rain moving through (read: excuses). Then after we loaded the boat up, we talked to a guy who just got done and said they killed it. Caught a ton of crappie, and 15 bass not even trying to catch them. Then we went to return our buoy and the guy got our numbers and said 2 different boats left earlier and they had caught 25 bass each. Also, a few boats earlier had caught around 200 crappie.

I guess I'm just not as good as I thought I was. I usually fish old lady Badin and can usually catch them there. I'm not asking anybody to give me their honeyhole, but what am I missing? Where should I be keying in at, and what lures have been working for you lately out there? If you would rather send me a PM to keep your info confidential that's fine too, because any help you can offer will help get me off the ledge.

- Sore loser