Reservation Number : 33200
Property Name : Butler Lake
Reservation Date : 07/09/2022 AM -
Total Fish/Sizes : 42 bass 8" to 5 lbs ; 19 harvested
Lures Used : dropshot, weightless flukes, crank bait, frog

Fellow member Ron Dupree and I had another great midsummer morning at Butler Lake landing 42 bass before noon. Amazingly, this is not an atypical result for us at Butler when the weather is scorching hot. It was 100 degrees with a 111 heat index when we got off the water shortly before noon but a nice breeze had kept things bearable for most of the morning.  The lake is about 16-18” low due to drought but with the steep banks this doesn’t reduce the fishable area much at all. Water temp was around 89 degrees.

We started out hoping for some frog action and Ron quickly landed two but that was it for the topwater bite.  For the next hour or so, Ron did a lot of catching using a dropshot at the edge of the vegetation while I did a lot of fishing with other techniques with nothing to show for it. He had 10 before I got my first one. We circled the lake again picking up the occasional bass on dropshot but having a high percentage of harvest-sized fish. We circled the lake another couple of times (we also tried fishing away from the bank but only 3 of 42 bass were from “open water”) and started catching larger bass on crankbaits and weightless flukes.  Most of the larger bass were by the dam.  We each caught a 5 lb “football” and together landed another 8-10 at 3-3.75 lbs each. We ended up harvesting 19 out of 42 bass landed.

Drophot and weightless flukes were by far the best producers on this trip. The perch were aggressively pecking away at the plastics and I caught one bluegill on a crankbait.

It’s pretty special when you have multiple great trips to a beautiful lake under such challenging weather conditions.