The wife urged me to take some time yesterday afternoon to do some fishing and clear my mind of the heavy family stuff going on. I checked the weather map and it looked like the rain showers were going to miss us so I loaded up and headed back to my favorite water, same lake I fished last week. I was on my own this week (some people actually ride motorcycles with their girlfriends and stuff, rather than go fishin'. Can you believe that?!) but that was OK with me. I didn't particularly want company today. Had a pretty good wind blowing which made things tougher but I had my fore and aft anchors and I was ready to deal with it. I set up my HB and set the 2 poles I was going to troll across the lake with as I made my way to my favorite spot.....all together now......THE DOCK! Here is a picture from the other day of my solo setup.
I tossed out my usual purple body/red firetail BPS grub and a BG baby shad. As I rowed across I marked a lot of fish suspended around 15' deep along my path but I was too light to get the lures down to them but that was OK with me, I had somewhere else I wanted to fish. I got about 2/3rds the way across when the BPS pole bent over with a hard hit. 1st fish was the yellow perch, nearly 12". He put up a surprising fight but slowed right down once he hit the ice in the cooler. I continued on and anchored up near the dock. I switched out the BPS grub to a small Southern Pro (I think) tube. I used 2 colors, kind of a green largemouth bass color and a lightish gray; I'm too lazy to look up the names. Those 2 tubes, along with 2 differerent minnow tubes accounted for all my fish today. The minnow tubes were a grey with rose belly, which has a history of working well in this water, and a brown body/orange belly which turned out to be a favorite for the Largemouth today.
My first fish from the area was the big fish of the day, a beat up crappie of a bit over 14" and man, did he stay deep and pull drag. I dipped the net under him and he was mine! I thought he might have made 15" but that was wishful thinking once I put him on the cooler top.
He was kinda beat up, with a bleeding dorsal fin and some other raw spots here and there but he was thick and well fleshed. I landed 3 more of 13, 12 and 11" (in that order) along with 9 nice keeper gills. I also kept one largemouth of legal length; usually I wouldn't but he had a big fat Senko rubber worm hooked in his gullet and about 3' of line hanging out of his mouth and I judged that he wasn't going to make it so in the cooler he went out of pity. I spent just over 2 hours around that area and caught and tossed back many more smaller gills and lots of other LMB. I'm sure I missed many more strikes due to the wind and stuff but I was satisfied with my efforts.
All in all, a very satisfying was to use up a Sunday afternoon.
Ken
Look's like that was just what the Dr. ordered. Congrat's.