Although this morning’s 48° start was still 11° warmer than yesterday‘s 37° start, the overnight temperatures were still well below the surface temperature of the lake, thus we continued to cool off following last Friday’s cold front.

The fishing was not quite as tough as it was yesterday, but the fish were still far from giddy. We managed a few fish horizontally in under 17 feet of water just after sunrise, picking up seven nice white bass on MAL Original Lures cast into about 20 feet of water and worked with a sawtooth method. That dried up after about 50 minutes.

I did some looking, and scratched at two areas while looking with sonar. The third area I headed to looked pretty good with two gulls working as we approached.

As I got over the patch of water the birds were working, I could see active fish as much as 2 or 3 feet up off the bottom, so I Spot-Locked on them, and we switched over to vertical tactics, employing three-quarter ounce Bladed Hazy Eye Slabs using a slow smoking tactic and moving the lures at a pace of 93 BPM.

This was our most productive stop of the trip and the action lasted about 30 minutes. As we fished, I noticed increased gull activity back behind us in deeper water – – about 30 feet of water.

I’m motored over toward these fish, and as I got closer, I could see some very light surface activity, despite a bit of chop on the water. I cut the motor a good hundred yards out from  this surface activity and trolled the rest of the way in to the fish. As we trolled in, I gave Terri and Roger instructions on how to use a countdown method to target these fish, which were obviously near the surface.

I had them cast, count the lure down four seconds, and then do a steady retrieve at a rate of 105 BPM. They each landed four or five fish that way, after which the fish activity and the bird activity slacked off.

Still seeing plenty of fish on bottom on both down- imaging and 2-D sonar, I switched us back to slow smoking with the slabs, and we landed another dozen or so until finally the activity at this entire area fell to nil.

We continued fishing another 45 minutes or so, and although we found fish, we simply could not get them to chase, nor show any interest whatsoever in our presentations.

We finished the day with 43 fish landed, including one hybrid striped bass, one freshwater drum, one largemouth bass, and 40 white bass.