You all know Walt & I like to drift for our favorite species, the crappie. Pretty hard to do when the water is dead calm and temps near 90 degrees! We've also had a deluge of rain and lousy weather as of late, so when today presented itself as a possibility, We decided to try for our "second" favorite species, the smallmouth bass.
Launched around 7:50 am on the main body of the Quabbin Reservoir. She's about 20 miles long and about 5 miles wide in spots. The "Q" is a water reservoir for our state's capital, Boston. So it's been "nit & tuck" trying to fight for our rights to continue fishing her. But I digress.....
Water temp was in the mid 70's with the air approaching 90 degrees by noon. Tough for us old geezers! We ended up calling it around 1:30 pm. Just could not take the heat. We tried about 4 our "standard" off-shore structures, looking mainly for bait fish. We don't search for bass. We search mainly for bait. Once found, we stop and cast various lures and drop shots until we hit a section of structure that gives us some promise. (Just like with crappie fishing, we do things differently!)
This is what the morning presented itself to us with:
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Remember I told you we look for bait.....well while vertical jigging blade baits in 32' of water, I caught this frisky hunk of meat that some smallie will love to chomp on:
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They surely do love to munch on yearling yellow perch. Did we "slay" 'em today? Hardly. But for not having done much bass fishing in last season or this, we did OK. All were "cookie cutter" size - about 2 to 2 1/2 lbs.. No giants, but respectable. We lost a few and here are some of our fish that we boated (and released unharmed):
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All in all a very pretty day! Just a tad too hot for my tastes. Calm conditions such as we experienced are fine, as long as the temp is in the upper 70's to low 80's. This was brutal. Which is why we called it early. Suppose to rain just about everyday this coming week now! Not sure when we'll get out again after our beloved crappie. But you can bet that if the opportunity presents itself, we'll be there!
