Thread: That’s a first

When you hit a certain age in life, the list of “firsts” gets shorter and shorter. By now, you figure there are not too many things left to accomplish in the outdoors world. Sure, you can best your biggest catch of a certain species, shoot a bigger deer, or catch more fish than ever before, but when you have been fishing as long as I have, you figure that by now you would have pretty much caught all there is to catch!

Last night, dad and I went over to a lake that I like to crappie fish. It was really early when we arrived so I didn’t expect to catch a whole lot until the sun got lower in the sky. The fish finder really told me all I needed to know. The water was too warm, the sun was too high, and there were zero fish. I figured they were hiding under the lily pads and brush on the bank, staying cool and in the shade.

As we made our way close to the weed edge on one side of the lake we both noticed a fish up close to the surface. It had a something white on it that appeared to be a snagged lure. I thought it was a pike based on the body profile and the length that I could see. I flipped my jig out in to the open water and within two twitches I had the fish on. As it got closer to the boat I could see that I had not hooked the fish in the mouth but actually in the white area on the back of the fish. 360 degrees on a compass and I threw my jig in the path of this fish perfectly. I couldn’t have gotten it closer if I tried (which I didn’t). As it got closer, we got a bird’s eye view of the fish. It was not a pike as we suspected!



In all of my years of fishing, this is the first Gar Pike I have ever caught. I’ve seen a few from time to time but they are pretty elusive. The white mark on the top of the fish appears to be where someone hit it with an arrow while bow fishing! The interesting part was, after I released this fish we saw no less than 20 more Gar of varying sizes fanning and moving along the surface. I had quite a few slash at the baits and dad had several that took the tails off his soft plastics. I’m not really sure why they were in this one area. I assume that this might be the time of year that they spawn. I know this lake chain gets hit pretty decent with bow fisherman. Now I know the reasons why! Pretty cool to catch something like this. Especially when you are now old enough to understand the gravity of catch. I’ve gone a long time before catching one. I might not ever catch another one!



Oh, we did catch some crappies. As expected, they were under the pads. Once the sun went down, they started to slide out to the edges. My normal tricks in this lake didn’t pan out but we were able to keep it simple, use a bobber, a number 6 aberdean hook, a minnow, and no weight to take home 11 decent sized crappies that will at some point in time be introduce to hot oil!