Storming with Arkies this morning!

[cevans]

As I drove to the lake to fish this morning, I could see the heat lightning lighting up the sky west, north, and east of me and I was constantly checking the Spark Lightning app on the weather bug and could see the lighning was 25 miles north so at 6:30 am I launched ahead of 3 other boaters and motored to mid lake to check out the creek channel that had been good to me in the past. I got the 3 rods out loaded with Arkie crankbaits, water temp was 73, very light breeze, stars to south of me as dawn was breaking and clouds to the north. In 20 minutes I had 5 keepers already in the box all 10-13.5 inches and all of the sudden, couple bolts of lightning cracked and weather bug said 1.5 miles away. I waited and trolled on as that was the end of it, and the fish kept on slamming my crank baits, speed was 1.7 to 1.8 as I cranked it up from my previous times of cranking and I was in a hurry anyhow as the weather bug showed storms eventually hitting me. About 30 minutes later it rained but the fish didn't care and neither did I as I kept catching keepers running the creek channel as I was catching them 8-9 ft down over 10-14' of water next to the channel. In 2.5 hrs, had a limit and had released about 30 as I kept measuring them and if they didn't hit the 10" mark, back in the lake they went. Hot colors again was purple/chartruese and this time Mad Clown as the crome was the hottie of the morning. I couln't run but 2 rods on Mad Clown as I couldn't keep up with the rods going off. Beat it back to the launch and loaded up and was back on the road at 10:45am and the rain broke loose with a dash of pea sized hail as there had to be 18 or more boaters getting slammed by the storms. You can sometimes get lucky as these fronts move thru and the fish are in a feeding mode. This time in cleaning the catch, 7 were males. Eggs still aren't ready for the fish to spawn. Sorry about the pic being sideways. Keep on fishing.