I think that when you see an egret in a tree in the fog, it's a sign of good fishing to come!
On Friday we tried to continue the success we enjoyed on Thursday, but headed out to a different lake. This one was a touch smaller than the lake on Thursday, and had not been fished at all in 2010 to this point. This is also the lake that I had previously caught my biggest largemouth ever in 2006. This particular piece of water is also full of big brim - which I love - and we had our ultralight spinning gear along in case we found some of them.
Foggy morning on Lake #2
There was a pretty dense fog as we drove along some deeply rutted dirt roads to get to the launch. The road would have been completely impassable if it was muddy. When we finally got to small launch, I could see multiple places where shad were being pushed into the banks by the bass and were being attacked. This shad pattern held all morning. Early in the morning, when we started, it was a bank pattern. As the sun rose and the fog burned off, the shad moved offshore and the bass followed them. We would take the boat out to the center of the lake and let the wind push us a cross the open water, casting at boils when we saw them, and just covering water when there was no surface action. But the bass were there, and we caught a lot of them. Lucky Craft crankbaits (Fat CB's) and LVR's ruled the day on Friday. Joey and I didn't count the fish on Friday morning, but I'd estimate we landed about 60 bass. We also found some brim. They were nice sized, but the really big ones eluded us. We primarily used Roadrunner Turbo Tails for the brim on the ultralights. the really fun part is, if we caught 15 brim, we got about 10 bass on the UL gear while fishing for the brim. Nothing over 3 pounds, but on UL spinning gear, it was all we could handle. And, the neatest occurrence of the day happened while we were catching brim. I had a typical brim on - 9" - 10" - and , as it got to the surface, I saw a HUGE bass chasing it. It never caught the brim, but gave a few quick lunges. This bass had to be in the 10-12 pound range - it was HUGE. We cast in the general area for a while, but never saw it again.
A typical sized brim from Friday
Joey with a nice bass from Friday
A bass caught on a crankbait on Friday. Crankbaits were the key on this day.
Another Friday bass for Joey
The size of the fish on this lake was very good, but not as big as the bass from the day before. With one exception. I hooked and landed a giant largemouth about a half hour into the morning. I'd put it in the same league as my biggest fish the day before. Again - no scale, so size is an estimate. 8#? 10#? 11#? Don't know . Just know it was very big. And I'm glad I caught it.
My big bass from Friday
We had to get washed up and leave for our return flight right after noon. I could have stayed there for a month, but am grateful for any time I get to spend on this property. We landed somewhere in the neighborhood of 180 largemouth in a day and a half, and some of them were truly trophy class fish. Now it's back to reality in Illinois. Our ponds will really heat up in the next 3 weeks. I'll get out to the ponds over lunch and after work, and I have plans to take some of Joeys friends out with us. Probably a newcomer or two from work as well. there should be no shortage of fishing adventures to write about in the coming months. Come along for the ride!
How do you determine if a bass trip has been a good one? A bad case of BASS THUMB!!!
