For the past several days, it's been hazy, hot & humid around here. Temps near 90 during the day time hours, plunging to a less than desirable lower 70's at night. Thunderstorms popping up all the time. Terrible fishing weather. However we had strong cold front push through last night and today was predicted to be low humidity, breezy with temps only in the upper 70's! Quite a change.
Every clock is correct twice a day. So goes our weather forecasts. We launched around 7:35 am today with air temp at 57 degrees! Quite a change. Water was still at 73 degrees, so not much changed there. We started fishing at 7:45 with Walt popping 'em left & right to start with. He definitely had the "hot" rod today; with me following him with variety.
When we pulled off at 1:45 pm (6 full hours of fishing), we managed to catch & release 68 fish. Much better than our previous trips for sure! Two of these were rainbow trout (nothing spectacular), one white perch and the majority being our target species, the crappie. The less significant balance were bluegill. Walt did number on those!
The significant change for today was the number of fish and bait that we repeatedly marked throughout the pond today. Here are a couple of shots:
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This was typical throughout the day today. Fish at or around 12 - 15 feet, mixed with bait fish. The breeze being a steady 10 - 15 mph, we elected drifting as our starting point. It was so good, we stuck with it for the rest of the day. Speaking of which, here is what our day looked like from start to finish:
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Simply beautiful! The breeze augmented our drifting pattern and we successfully capitalized on it. Like I said, Walt got the majority of fish today; I probably got more crappie than he, but it's debatable. Get a load of that bluegill. They were all like this - fat, sassy and in great health! We both did good however. Here's some shots of our successes:
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Here's what the rainbows looked like. Definitely up stream stockers. Not very fit, but fun on UL gear non the less:
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Here a few more shots of the kind/sizes of crappie we got today:
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Very respectable crappie. No giants, but fun none the less. Most fish today came on CB Sliders. The curly tails did well too. The straight tails, not so good. Never got to try the Roadrunners as the action was pretty steady throughout the morning. Tell you this much, the bluegill raised holy heck with my plastics inventory! Got a bag of almost 1/4 lb. of torn, tailless baits! Grizzly Jig....here I come - again!
One passing thought for speculation. In my 50+ years of fishing, some doctrines pop up, every now & again, as "gospel". One such is that with a steady wind blowing, the majority of bait (and consequently fish) will be on the down wind side of the pond. Bass fisherman have proclaimed this thesis periodically over the years. Tell ya what......don't buy into anything that proclaims to be "gospel". Most of our fish came on the up wind side of the pond, where we started our drifts. Figured you might find this tidbit to be value added.
Hope everyone had a chance at least to hit the water today. God Bless you all and God Bless America. :biggrin
