I'm on the water now, and the water is muddy. It's been muddy every time I came down to the river this summer. It's pretty dirty right now, but I found a little area that was cleaner and caught a few fish this morning. It's tough right now, but if the temperature cools down between now and the tournament, things could get better. Dolin mentioned another troublesome element - an overgrowth of water chestnut that could frustrate efforts to locate bass in sizable sections of the Hudson.
Water chestnut is a small, tough, leafy rooted plant which grows on shallow flats.
It's grown so much that the fish can get back in there and hide where they're unreachable. Hopefully, it will break up some and the fish will start moving out to the points. Some sections of water chestnut are so massive that finding bass in there is like finding a needle in a haystack. The water chestnut is so thick in places that outboards cannot penetrate it. Roland Martin won the 1984 tournament on the Hudson by running the tide.