4th Day of Sunshine

I previously reported that it takes four days of bright, uninterrupted sunshine to get our fish to turn on. Last Wednesday was the 3rd such day, beautiful. with a cold front bearing down to boot. I had a half-day guide special trip that got kicked off about 11:30 am. Fished until about 6:00 pm and caught a total of 10 small bass between the three of us. I tried most everything I thought would work. We caught fish shallow on stick baits and deep on grubs, but found only a couple of spurts of reasonably aggressive fish.

By the end of the day I felt like a defeated man. In spite of my own admonitions of “it’s only the third day” I had my expectations/hopes too high.

Yesterday I was scheduled to take a friend crappie fishing. We were going to do a little work and then hit the water. The day time high was 20 degrees cooler than on Wednesday and the wind was sharp out of the east. When I got to my friends shop he was using good fishing judgement and offered to let me out of the fishing. I gave his offer careful consideration, but finally talked him into bring a rod with the promise that we would not turn our fishing into an all day affair if we could not get some cooperation.

What a wise choice we made! We started fishing about 3:30 pm and caught 34 big crappie by 6:30. They were in a treetop about 4 feet deep. We laughed and laughed about our efforts to talk ourselves out of going. My cell phone rang when we first got started fishing. I had caught one nice crappie and a couple smaller ones when I answered the phone. It was an AP customer calling to cancel his Friday trip due to “bad weather”. He asked my advice and as always I told him, “You need to go fishing when you can.” This is always my advise barring ice, lightening, or tornados.

Should find out today if the bass have responded to the 5th day of sunshine. They have disappeared from the shallows so the cold front definitely knocked them back to the deeper water. I will keep you posted!Don Kentner