I fished a morning “Kids Fish, Too!” trip today with Ethan R. and his grandfather, Butch. Butch traveled in from Fall River, MA, to visit his family here and surprised 11 year old Ethan with this fishing trip.
The fish were a bit sluggish today, and once again we encountered some pretty tough winds, but, by the time all was said and done we put together a pretty good bag for our efforts.
Grandpa Butch and Ethan with one of our larger white bass taken by downrigging today.
Ethan and his first fish of the day taken on topwater.
Start Time: 6:15a
End Time: 12:00 Noon
Air Temp: 76F at trip’s start, heading towards the mid-90’s.
Water Surface Temp: ~84.5F
Wind: Winds were SSE8 at sunrise, slowly tapering up to S19 by trip’s end.
Skies: Skies were ~30% cloudy and fair in the breaks.
We started out today looking and listening around Area 061 for any topwater action we could find. Right around 6:45, we began to see largemouth in small wolfpacks of 3-6 fish each popping up over open water. We got Ethan positioned on the casting deck and, with some dockside practice fresh under his belt, got him in range of some action. He hooked up with a small largemouth with a big attitude on just his second (very accurate!) cast. I thought this was going to be a good deal — surface feeding fish and a kid who could cast well — but, it wasn’t to be. The surface feeding just shut down after a sparse 10 minutes or so and never redeveloped before the winds started pushing whitecaps.
We then looked over a few areas looking for schooled white bass to jig for. As Ethan got the hang of “slabbing” he landed a drum at Area 205 and lost one other fish at Area 463, but, all in all, the slab bite was pretty soft today.
We then began targeting the suspended, scattered fish we’d seen in two different areas, and found some willing fish at Area 645. With balls set at 23-25 feet we combed this area very thoroughly and put 9 fish in the boat — all white bass — including two sets of doubles on the Pet/Licker tandem rig. Once this played out we ran the same program from Area 148 to Area 648 and put 3 more fish in the boat here by around 11am. Ethan was a huge help in maximizing our “lures in the water” time as he rigged the lines and dropped the balls down for me after very quickly getting the hang of those skills.
Before finishing up the trip, we gave shallow water sunfish a try at Area 200 before calling it a day. Ethan used an ultralight spinning rig with a slipfloat and wore out the sunfish pretty thoroughly. In less than 30 minutes he boated 11 sunfish consisting of small bluegill, green sunfish, and longear sunfish.
Ethan finished up today boating 26 fish for his efforts. By the time we got back to the dock he looked ready for some grub, some A/C, and a good ol’ afternoon nap!
TALLY = 26 FISH, all caught and released