Ross Barnett Labor Day Weekend

On Sunday, August 31, I got on the water around 7:30 am, and the surface temp was below 80 degrees F and slowly rose to above 80 degrees F by lunch time. A few bit my crankbaits pretty quickly, although the bite slowed down the closer to lunch time that I got and then pretty much shut off. Despite the smaller fish that threw back and one that I accidentally dropped and flopped off the back of the boat when measuring, I did manage to bring back 5 crappie (and 1 catfish worth messing with).



On Monday, September 1, I got up early again to see that the surface temp was already 80 degrees F, and ended up with just a couple of catfish. While there were plenty of fish suspended and hanging around brush piles, they weren’t in the mood to chase anything moving. I didn’t see anyone fishing other methods having luck either. I went back to check the Pearl River’s flow since we did have a lot of rain earlier in the week, and it looks like it settled out. I didn’t have my smaller jigs or the minnow bucket in the boat to switch to a lighter method to see what was going on with the fish. My wife wasn’t too happy that I woke her up two days in a row and was even more mad when I had only the two catfish fillet to show for the effort. Don’t worry, she’s all happy with me again when I brought home her new Pathfinder lease from Corporate Vehicles so that she doesn’t have to keep driving around in my Titan.

Now that the weather is getting a little cooler, I think that I need to repack the boat with my jig poles smaller lures again, since it’ll allow me to test other techniques in a given area when the fish aren’t active enough to chase baits. I had lightened the load in the boat to see what speed differences that I would have between two props and because I wasn’t using most of the other rods and storage boxes all summer.