My 65 years of bass fishing experience has been that fishing before, during, and after a full moon can be terrific at night, but not so much during daylight hours, so I really didn’t know what to expect yesterday.  Still, the partly cloudy sky, the calm surface, and a beautiful sunrise all contributed to my hoping for a good day on the water.

It did start out that way. Before I launched, I made my first cast from the ramp, and about a 10” crappie hit my Yellow Magic. After I launched shortly after 6:00, I went past the first three aerators and cast a junebug 10.5” Ol’ Monster worm into the aerator bubbles on the east side of the boathouse.  A healthy fish picked it up as it sank, and I soon boated it at 6:10. It seemed a good start, and my anticipation went up a click or two. Unfortunately, it was 8:15 before I boated another fish. It was a 3-04, and picked up a weightless, wacky-rigged black/blue flake, 5” Senko that I had cast into what I call “The Logjam,” the biggest of the few downed trees in the lake. I short-lined the Senko back into the limbs, and lost one of about the same size when it jumped.

The sun was starting to get hot, so I moved south of the islands into the reeds (see photo). The water there is pretty shallow, so I raised the trolling motor and tilted it so it wouldn’t “ground out.” No results around the edges of the reeds, even in the shade, so I moved into what looked like a creek channel that went farther back into the reeds. That was the best move I made all day. Using a chartreuse single-spin with chartreuse blade, I had a hard strike and soon landed a 2-08 at 8:45. Several long casts later up that “channel’ resulted in a solid strike on that same spinnerbait, and after a good fight in those reeds, I boated a 5-12 at 9:00. After a couple of unsuccessful casts with the single-spin,  I picked up a white Terminator frog made one very long cast up the same “channel.” As soon as I twitched it, a very strong fish literally exploded on that HB frog. I got a good hook set, but it popped my seat support out of its channel. I had a bit more trouble landing that one, since I fought the fish from an almost prone position, with my seat kind of lying down on top of my tackle boxes. Had anyone been looking, it probably would have been hysterical. At any rate, no one else was there, and after the rather unusual fight, I boated the 5-13 at 9:05. All three of those "reed fish" were in less than 14” of warm, shady water. About thirty minutes later, a 4-04 hit that same frog in open water, but still in the shade of the reeds. At 9:56, a couple of hundred yards north of the west rock point, again in the shade, a 5-06 picked up my unweighted, wacky-rigged Senko – a watermelon/red flake.

So, in four hours of fishing, I had caught only 7 bass - but two were over four and three were over five, with one almost reaching six pounds. I’d call that a pretty good day, even if I caught nothing else. That didn’t happen, but the ‘big bass bonanza’ was over. I fished non-stop for 9 more hours, until 7:00 p.m, but ended up boating only 8 or 9 more bass. Two were dinks, and the others were all between 12 and 14 inches long. Two of the larger ones hit a Storm 5” swim bait in the aerator bubbles. Still, a very good day on the water

The water clarity was only 9-10” all over the lake, and the water temp climbed from 77.7 to 89.9 by the time I trailered. The hydrilla has almost reached the surface in the shallows all around the lake. Although I saw no lily pads, but I did notice several small patches of American Pondweed north of the boathouse and around the islands.

What worked:  (see text)

What didn’t work:  Rattletrap, Brush Hog, buzz bait, Whopper Plopper (I did miss one good strike on it), shallow squarebill, frog-pattern HB frog.

Posted By: Tom Dillon