Well i was on pool 8 yesterday for some fun with a friend of mine. My friend is from my baseball team and he likes to fish but has no experience in bass fishing and realy none with artificial lures either. Well i had him throwing a bucktail spinner while i threw swimm jigs and tubes and creatures. I did well on numbers but not much size to the fish today. every where we tried, it seemed like the 10 inchers were out in full force. I did catch 2 keepers at 2 lbs each but the rest of the day was all small fish. We probably fished around 4 hours and then we hung out with another friend and went to the rope swing to swim. it was a fun day and my friend had a really fun time catching fish. i think he caught 5 fish, including his first sheephead ever and his first northern ever. He was pretty excited. I probably caught 15-20 bass but again, only 2 keepers. i don’t know whats up on the river lately, but i can’t put together a solid pattern anymore. Obviously i’ve been able to find lots of fish in good abundance but they just aren’t bumping out on the board. lots of 12-13-1/2 inch fish coming to my boat, which is great for someone who has never caught good numbers before, but sucks for me…
I have pondered for a long time wondering what has happened to the bass bite and i have concluded that its not just the tournament or just the weather but its a little of both. I think all of the fish that were stuck durring practice and in the tournament are probably still very sluggish. i bet there were 50,000 or more keeper fish actually caught durring the time from practice to the end of the tournament. I may be running high but wouldn’t be surprised. You throw in the 100 degree heat and boy its tough. I think that could be the reason why we’re seeing a lot of dinks. the keepers could be more sluggish after being stuck. I know several pros were fishing goose area pretty much daily up to 2 weeks before the tournament.
i’m just hoping the cooler temps were supposed to have at the end of the week will bring back the hot bite, just like it was in late june-early july with low 80’s every day and sun. The bite was really really hot then.
good luck.
August 1, 2006 at 1:38 pm
#1216329
I hate those things. It’s a tough time of year. The guys that won it were fishing the main river. All big smallies.
it was wierd and also frustrating. I would hate to see what it was unless of course it was a big old carp or something but was thinking along the lines of a nice smallie. I caught some small fish on the dams on a crankbait or plastic craw. I moved to a couple other ones and finally got a good keeper on one of the dams on a crankbait. It was a 2.1 smallie. Not too bad at 16-1/4″ long but not excessively girthy. i caught more small fish and fished some more dams and caught one more smallie just under 2 lbs. This one was 15-1/2 inches and again pretty skinny. i caught some more dinks and decided to try my luck in a new area. I have heard of some stories of success up here but never tried it or even went through the area. I was fishing French Slough near Round lake. I still only had 2 keepers and a bunch of dinks at around 3 o’ clock and thought that i better get back to some wingdams to try and scrounge out a few more smallies hopefully since I wasn’t getting bit in the pads that i was fishing. But i looked behind me and saw a bunch of bait and bass moving. I fished the rest of the pads and went to where i saw the bait. the fish were still around and busting. They wouldn’t take my swim jig (it wasn’t the right color) So i threw a zarra puppy to match their surface feeding habbits. That bait was the ticket. I caught 3 keepers and several more 10-13 inch fish. It was fun to see them blow up on the bait. I talked to a guy that was leaving the lily pads and he said that he caught 10 fish 9 keepers off the same spot in the morning on a Pop-R. Pretty interesting. Anyway i filled a limit, big fish was a skinny 17″ LM that went only 2.6 lbs. i felt happy that i found fish in a new area though and got around 10-1/2 lbs, better than yesterday’s limit. 