On the off chance that I might make that one cast that pays off with a 'big girl,' I decided to try one more time this fall at Yates Place. It was mostly calm all day, with only a few moments of light wind and two short rain showers. Unfortunately, the lake didn't know it was still fall. Water temps ranged from 45^° early to mostly 47^° later. The warmest water I found was 49^° was late in the day, both in front of the house and at the dam. Note that my transducer is on the bottom of my trolling motor battery, not at the surface, and it can be several degrees different from the surface temp. Also, the lake is up another foot or so, and Dewayne told me that it's as full as it gets,.

The cold water is also still a bit colored from the rain, and those two factors definitely had the feed mostly off. There were a few fish busting shad throughout the day, but not very many. I saw several dead 3- to 4-inch bloody shad floating on the surface, but nothing smaller than that. After 8 hours of no luck on anything plastic or pork, I finally tied on a #11 original floating Rapala 4 7/8"), on which I caught the only 2 fish of the day: one 10-inch dink and one 1-pound bluegill. That's it.

I think I'm going to go nuts waiting for warm water.