week of June 20th, 2011

6/20-6/23, 2011
I went out this week with plans to fish nights with Rhandy and mornings with Dale.  This is the time of year when split days are nice so you can avoid the heat of the day.  Siestas rock!  The forecast a week out was for 75-100 degrees, light winds, and dry.  As usual, the weather idiots missed by a mile. 

Monday the wind was howling around 25 miles an hour so we put in over at Leafy Branch on the west side of the lake.  We pulled out about 6 pm and pulled up on a hole Rhandy had some success with recently.  We caught some little ones on flukes at the first spot, then moved over to a shallower spot nearby.  We boated 21 bass in 2 hours with the largest being about 5.5 pounds.  There were plenty of 4 and 5 pound chunks and some little ones.  It was a blast.  They slowed down a bit after 8 pm and we only caught 5 in the next hour.  We tried a couple of other spots with no success, then moved back into Leafy Branch for the night fishing.  We stayed til about 1:30 am and caught about 5 more.  Nothing big but we had some fun.  The high winds kept us from moving around much, but a 31 bass evening was a great start.

I was scheduled to go out with Dale on Tuesday morning but lightning and heavy rain kept us off the lake.  So much for the hot and dry forecast.  Things cleared out about noon so Rhandy and I headed out again around 5:30 for the evening.  The winds were back down again and we headed right to our hot spot from the night before.  The winds calmed for a bit and it got pretty steamy for awhile.  Rhandy made the mistake of crabbing about the lack of wind so at 6:45 it cranked back up to 25 miles an hour.  We had 3 foot waves crashing over the bow.  We stayed tied off til they calmed back down and managed to catch 17 bass by about 8:30.  As we moved off to a deeper spot, the sandbass started schooling around us in about an acre sized group.  We pitched a few jigs and caught them on every cast. Then Rhandy noticed that the clouds moving in were showing some lightning.  He made the wise decision to head closer to the ramp in case we had to get out of the weather.  Sure enough, the clouds started rolling in and we started hearing thunder so we bagged it around 9 pm.  Anyone who is on the lake when lightning is around is a dumbass.

The weather gods smiled on Wednesday, June 22 and I finally got a morning in with Dale.  We pulled up on a main lake point around 6 am and Dale hooked an 8 pounder on his first cast!  I stayed skunked for a couple of hours (except one drive-by sandbass that bit my fluke) but finally caught up after we moved into one of his holes in Little Caney.  We stayed there most of the morning and ended up with 18 bass in the boat, mostly on flukes on Carolina rigs. 

The evening fishing started out about 5:30 again and we headed to our usual honey hole.  This evening the wind was calm and it was awful steamy again when the sun was not behind a cloud.  I warned Rhandy he'd better keep quiet if he didn't want waves breaking over the bow again!  Fishing was much much slower and we only caught 3 or 4 at our hot spot.  However the lack of quantity was made up by quality when I hooked a 7 pound 9 ounce fish on a delicious fluke Carolina rigged.  That was a fun fight.  Later on we switched to a deeper hole and found that they wanted shakey head worms instead of flukes.  We added another 4 or 5 fish there before moving to some bank fishing in Little Caney. We caught a few more there on shakey heads before calling it a night about 11 pm.  I think we ended up with 12 or 13 total for the night.

Rhandy with a nice one at sunset.

I went out with Dale again the next morning and we put another 20 fish in the boat over about 4 hours.  I don't think we boated anything over 4 pounds but we still had a good time.