Seems long, but the short story:
One of my college buddies recently had a business trip to my area of the state and his son hadn’t started college just yet, so we planned to see if we couldn’t get a ski for his son…
Thursday night Tyler (son) wasn’t feeling so good, so after the casting instructions and some casting, he just laid down in the boat, poor kid… I managed a largie on a small mepps and one esox fish, but it hit at dark and jumped before I could my ultra dim flashlight on it to determine which esox it was.
So following day off to spend some time on a lake offered to me by area guide Capt. Matt Raley of Hideaway Hollow Outfitters. He had been having fair success catching fish for his clients on this body of water and he offers guaranteed musky trip for those who are interested in his guiding services.
So we continued to work on our casting and figure 8’s being wind blown down a nice shoreline with shadows and great weeds. Water temps were 69*. I had one little scutter hit a perch phantom softail, but come unbuttoned right away.
We moved to a couple of other areas without much success trying more shade and then the south bay with nice weeds to see if the wind would help us out, but to no avail. I was also aware of moon rise at 5:30 p.m. wanting to fish at least that long and if things started looking up all the way to dark.
At 5:40 in some shade on a point of pads, my mepps marabou (orange blade over black tail) made contact with a solid fish. Once netted, the bucktail popped out nicely, a couple of pics and back in the cradle for measurement and release. Well, once that fish was righted it was ready to go and while I had the bump end of the cradle a little too low, it took advantage of the deal and shot out of the cradle basically unmeasured… Guessing 38″-40″ and 15#-18#’s
All day I had been preaching that a bait that is not acting like it should, should be retrieved and 8’ed like normal just in case… Around 7:30 Terry (father) was bringing in his creeper and it was spinning 360’s… He knew it wasn’t running right and picked it out of the water and a huge boil erupted right next to the boat!!! I tried to 8 the fish into striking my shallow invader to no avail.
I laid a waypoint and we moved off and the plan was to come back just before we left to see if we could get it to eat. We fished until there was about ten minutes of any kind of light left. I put the creeper on the kids and a hawg wobbler on Terry’s rods. We started on the deep side thinking we would get our bearings and during the first cast both their baits were only 6′ part… I looked down and all hell broke loose. A fish had hit Terry’s bait and he ground it in, I netted it and the line broke right then, but it was in the bag. We measured it at 40.25″ and figured it as a solid 20#er, not bad for his first fish.
We wandered around that waypoint for 30 minutes or so hoping that Tyler might get that first fish and got nothing else.
Back the next day to see if we could get Tyler his fish, but not to be this trip. Enough for now, gotta get some more work done. Great to see some success in a musky trip for an old friend!!!
Mark
