I floated my pond boat in Lower Hart right after sunrise, and found it to be at least a foot higher than it was last week. I guess the drenching it got Monday night helped. I started out chunking a white bladed jig with a white Keitech paddle-tail trailer, with no success. I changed trailers, putting on a 5” Lake Fork Magic shad in an iridescent green color, and that did the trick. On my next 3 casts in a row, I caught a 2- and two 3.5-pounders, all from the same stickup - but then it slowed again. After 3 hours of very little action while fighting a strong wind, I moved to Upper Hart with 3 harvest fish in the boat, having released 5 over 14”. The most activity I had seen for the past 4 hours had consisted of loudly-honking Canada Geese. Maybe they were trying to drown out the awful squeaking and clanging of the oil rig; they almost did, and there were only 10 of 'em!

Upper Hart is where I found out what ‘strong wind’ really means! Once I launched on the upper lake, the wind picked up. For the next 6 hours, it varied from a sustained strength of about 20 mph up to gusts of ‘OMG!’ Until around 3:30, it made fishing a real challenge. In spite of that, from 10:30 until 4:30 on Upper Hart, I caught a total of 30 more hard-fighting fish, 20 of which were over 14”. They hit the same white bladed jig, but only when I went back to the white Keitech trailer that bass had ignored in the lower lake. I also picked up some 3-pounders on a 12” Monster worm in Junebug. I had to use a pegged ½ oz slip sinker to maintain contact with the bottom, keep the bow in my line manageable, and feel both bottom cover and bites. After the seemingly tornadic wind velocity dropped down to about 5 mph at 3:30, I did pick up one ‘keeper’ on a weightless, wacky-rigged Senko in black with blue flakes. I missed several pickups on a Rage Tail Craw fished on a stand-up jighead and one on a black/blue flake 12” Monster Worm. Nothing at all on single-spin, bluegill-colored bladed jig, topwater, frog, swim bait, or worms/Senkos in green pumpkin or watermelon, with or without flakes. I also lost 5 or 6 hooked bass, but I don’t think any of them were over 4 lbs. The only fish I thought might have been any bigger than that was one I lost on a 7.5” white fluke on a weighted hook. It’s hard to get a good hook set with a big bow in your line, and the one I had when that bass struck must have been at least as long as my cast was!

I finally gave it up at 4:30, deciding to let the wind gods and oil drillers have it. The wind made getting my little pond boat back on its trailer a chore, too.

The water temp at Lower Hart had climbed from 52.1° to 54.2° by 10:30, and the visibility was about 2 feet. The upper lake was a uniform 53.2° at 10:45, and climbed to 56.1° by 4:30. Visibility on Upper Hart was less than a foot.

I had envisioned boating some big girls yesterday, but the combination of cold rain, cold water temp, and screaming winds quickly and effectively negated those aspirations, Still, I think that landing 38 bass under yesterday's conditions was a pretty good day, and made it easier to ignore the awful noise coming from the oil rig between the two lakes.

(One thing that I did find strange was that all of the bass over 4 pounds were long and rather thin, while the little ones were pretty chunky. Of the 13 harvest bass, I only found eggs in 3 of them.)

For those of you heading up to Cody Ranch for the group trip next week, I hope you have better fishing conditions than I did yesterday.

Posted By: Tom Dillon