Week of March 26, 2012 personal best

I booked 2 and a half days with Dale Stokes this week and the weather was as good as it ever gets.  Lows in the 60's and highs in the low to mid 80's.  Winds were light except for Tuesday afternoon, when they were a bit blustery.  Nothing like what we have been through before, though.  The lake is now just 2 feet low.  It has come up over 5 and a half feet in the last month and is looking like the Lake Fork of old again.  It sure is nice to be able to run the boat lanes.

The main comment for this week was the fishing was SLOW!!  I caught 3 fish each day with only 5 to 7 bites a day.  Even the bites were a bit tentative, like they didn't really want to take the bait.  Tiny little taps with only a couple of bites where they really wanted it.  We saw a LOT of carp, crappie, and gar up shallow and I even hooked a 2 pound drum on a shakey head jig.  That was a first.  Might have been some crappie and carp pecking at my bait at times.

On Monday we had a few bites early and I caught one small bass dead sticking a fluke.  Then I had 4 straight hours with zero bites at all.  We fished wacky worms, shakey heads, flukes, all the usual suspects with no joy.  Finally I just decided to stick with a shakey head for the rest of the day and was quickly rewarded with a small tap about 1 pm.  I whanged on it and no fish.  Drat. 

We moved around a bit and I had another little tap at 2 pm.  This time I tightened up and lifted the rod tip to see if the fish was there.  Nope.  Felt the shakey head but no fish.  So it twitched it once and let it sit.  Another tap and a slight pull and I set the hook.  When I pulled back, the rod stopped dead at 10 o'clock and bent over double.  I saw this big mouth wallowing at the end of my line and knew I had a good fish.  She came to the boat no problem and when I saw it I thought it would go 8 or 9 pounds.  As Dale went to net it, the fish dove trying to go under the boat stripping off drag as it went.  I got my thumb on the spool and horsed it up and it made another dive for the prop and a stump near the back of the boat.  Again, I stopped the run and horsed her back towards Dale's net and she was in.  As I reached in the net to get the fish I saw the gut and knew I had a new personal best.  Dale's scale said 10.2 pounds and I don't doubt it.  My new personal best and my first double digit bass.  After a couple of quick pictures we sent her on her way and off she went to make more baby bass.  Woo hoo!  Now that's a nice reward for 4 hours with NO bites!

 

The next two days were anti-climactic after that fun.  We caught a few more small bass the next day and a half but they just were not biting very good at all.  Most of the other fish came dead sticking flukes with a few on shakey heads.