I don't know how much more runoff we can handle, but it is really making things tough on the north end of the lake. I left the dock at daylight Saturday morning with Trey Smith, Dr. Dan Martin and his dad and we never saw the first bird working until we shut down at the mouth of WIllow.
Trey caught the best red of the day on a Spoiler Shad.
The water started clearing about Bridge Bayou, but there just weren't any birds moving around. They may have worked a little later as we never came back that way, electing to just keep moving south. We never worked the first set of birds, but we still finished with a very nice catch of trout and reds with several of our trout in the 3 to 4 pound range.
Trout like these made it easy to forget about the absence of gulls!
We caught them on everything from a Creme Spoiler Shad to tails under a Kwik Cork. Once again, color did not seem to be as critical as speed of retrieve. There was some bait working the surface in two of the areas we fished, but we were more concerned with depth. Every fish we caught came out of 3 to 5 feet of water.
I had an opportunity to throw anything I wanted as the rest of the group were steady catching fish, but I never stuck the first big trout. I caught a couple of pretty good fish on a Catch V, but no better than anything Trey or the Martins caught on a Swim Bait or Assassin.
I haven't even stopped to fish this program, but there is a good flounder bite going on right now. The mouths of the drains and any of the bayous that you can run are producing very nice flounder up to 24-inches. The redfish are in there as well, but a large percentage of them are 15 to 19-inch fish. Most folks are just fishing fresh dead shrimp on the bottom, but some of the better catches are coming on GULP shrimp fished on a Carolina rig. The larger shrimp has worked better than the 3-inch version.
I am going to eat dinner with the Orange CCA Chapter at Cornbreads on McArthur Drive tomorrow night at 6 pm. After that, I am going to speak to the group and we are going to have a question and answer session. Hopefully I will have some answers. It is going to be fun as we are going to talk about everything from matching tackle to winter patterns. Come on out...the worst you can do is enjoy a terrific supper and visit with other fishermen!
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