Mickey and I hit the ramp at 6:00 this morning. We had a good spot in mind for this water stage. There was nothing there early but we tried some other places and were going to come back. At one of the other places we managed to catch one but the lake is still mighty high for our spots. We then came back to the starting spot and caught a small fish and a stripe. We just couldn’t get it to happen today so we headed for home. Tried 6 spots in all and one of those twice. Two bass, not very good.

EDIT: I found out that a tournament was won later this week at our starting spot. We only fished 10 feet deep at the most. The fish were caught 15 to 20 feet deep on plastic. Once before at this time of year, I remember the fish going deep. It seems early for that to me but I’m not going to forget the lesson learned.

When Jackson and I talked about going to Cane Creek, I said I wanted to go in my boat because it needed washing out. There was a 50% chance of rain and the boat had been in the garage for a month. We were on the lake at 6:00 ready to fish. Jackson had on a rage tail shad and I had a Ribbit although there were some waves in the open water. The rage tail shad soon caught one and had another bite that did not connect. By then I had changed to a swimbait for the open water and the stumps. One bit and was snatched up out of the water but came unpinned.  Soon we were in some lily pads and I changed back to the Ribbit that caught the FOD that was 3 pounds.  Almost immediately thereafter it caught another . The lily pads are like everything else this year, a little late, and are just unfurling their leaves. There were many beautiful places to fish. The Ribbit was catching one every now and then. Bites were few and far between. Jackson went through a collection of hollow body frogs with no bites. One popping frog I thought was particularly good but not even a bite. By 2:00, with 8 fish, we were discussing calling it a day when Jackson said that he came with a bait tied on and had not used it and wanted to try it before we left. He had a fluke on that rod and proceeded to fish with it. After he caught one, he then proceeded to give a fluke fishing demonstration. The fish were in the openings in the pads and a fluke thrown there was going to get scarfed. We ended up with 16 when we quit at 5:00. It did not rain on us except a little in the morning so the boat looked like it was not going to get a bath but on the way home in Lake Village there was a toad strangler that did a great job.

With a full moon shining, Jackson and I put in just as it was light enough to fish. We went straight to the place where I caught them last time. It was unbelievable, no wind on Monticello. Jackson started with a buzz bait and I started with a swim bait. We both started getting bites but no fish got caught. It was white bass (known in river lakes as stripes). I quickly put on a 1//4 oz. red eye shad and the misses turned into catches. The fish were not in the sticks and stumps but out in the open on a shallow shell bed. There were occasional largemouths. A 4 1/2 was the first in the boat and after a while another about that size came unbuttoned. The one that was caught had a 6 pound head but was slender because it had spawned recently and had a 4 1/2 pound behind. By 8:30 the bite was about over and afterward it was slow. One of the good spots was close to a relatively low osprey nest. When we fished there the mama became nervous and would fly off the nest but come back close circling low, Here she is returning to the nest.

After the opening 1 1/2 hours the day turned slow and we left around 2:00 after catching 5 fish, the FOD being the first one.

I arrived at Lake Monticello at 6:30 this morning to a slick lake and a 58 degree water temperature. My plan was to use a Whopper Plopper and see if they would hit on top. To keep from wasting too much time, I allotted 20 casts to the WP before changing to a swimbait that worked a month ago. I caught one on cast number 7, a small one but it ran off the skunk and kept me fishing on top for a while longer. Nothing else would bite so out came the swimbait and it quickly caught a 3 3/4 making me believe things were going to really start happening. What happened was about a two hour drought. Moving helped, because the bites began to come quickly afterward. I missed too many to suit me so the Booyah came out and was effective but after a while the swimbait had to come back out. The water was 4 to 8 feet deep and with loads of stumps both big and small. I began to notice that fish came from around the biggest stumps or a clump of medium sized ones. Since I ran out of the good area, a move was again in order. Moving helped things again because I had picked a spot with many big stumps in water from 6 to 12 feet deep. I began to be able to forecast where the fish were. Throwing into one large group of trees, a good fish hit and gave me a run for the money. The fish was 5 – 0, and I was planning on fishing that bunch of trees very thoroughly. The wind, however, had reared its ugly head by this time and had other plans when it blew the boat straight in the middle of the trees. It had become too stiff to fish the good spots. I tried another good spot that I know of but nothing was going on there, so I quit. There was a total of 14 bass. Beside the two fish mentioned there were 4 more in the 3 pound range. A good day.

Jackson and I went to Lake Monticello this morning by way of McGhee due to the water over the highway from Dermott. We arrived in plenty of time to fish. The wind was blowing lightly but that would change. The water temperature started at 57 and went to 59 before the afternoon was over.We started in one of the North pointing fingers fishing all of the relatively shallow wood with a swimbait. In five minuted Jackson had chased the skunk. It took me a little longer to get going as I started off with a line snap as I set the hook.  One of these days I’ll learn to retie my line for each trip. A series of mishaps followed and turned into a comedy of errors. All the while, Jackson was steadily catching fish. I stuck with the swimbait and finally started to make it work better. We had a pretty good pattern worked out and stayed in fish most of the day. The wind was terrible for most of the day. Since we were in Jackson’s boat, he ran the trolling motor and the wind gave him fits. He handled the boat well but there are so many stumps it was difficult and tiring. Toward noon or a little after I began to come into my own and began to make the swimbait work. We ended the day with 26 fish and a 2 1/2 pound FOD. Had we caught all that bit or we had on we would have caught 20 more.

Went to Lake Enterprise and went with Jackson to some spots where he has been catching some fish. We started about 8:00 with our rainsuits on due to a light rain. The rain quit but the bass never started. We caught only one on a Rex spoon. The spoon was because we were fishing through a lot of weeds sticks and etc where it was easy to get hung up. A Rex spoon is a very weedless bait.

Hal mentioned that he caught his first Whopper Plopper bass of the year recently, three in fact. When we were talking about that today Jackson told me about some Youtube videos of violent topwater strikes. I just watched it and found myself laughing. They can be found at;   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ_S2fvWWew

After physical therapy this morning I came home and loaded up to go fishing with intentions to go to what used to be called the Firetower. I’ve also heard it called the Belzoni cutoff and seen it on the map as Hardcash Lake. Whatever you want to call it, it is long, crooked and narrow and just what the doctor ordered on a day when the wind was hawking at about 20. At a place like that you can always find a relatively calm place to fish. At 1:00 the water temp was 58 at the landing but was 64 in the end that the wind was blowing to. The water was high and turbid, almost muddy so I put on a 1/4 ounce Booyah spinnerbait with Colorado blades. In the past high and muddy equaled the fish being right on the bank but that was not it today. The first one, a 3 pounder , came from a bunch of fine vines that was a good bit off of thee bank. It was a long time before another bit, this time a 3 1/2 off of another log that had a fuzzy tip. So Fuzzy it was but not every fuzzy had a fish. I went a long time without a bite but then had two in close succession, both fuzzy, but they were not hungry enough to get the point of the hook. I quit a little early because it was not happening for me. The best thing that happened today was when I loaded the boat. Since the last trip I put a walkboard on the tongue of the trailer and another one on the side. They worked perfectly and made getting out of the boat and in the truck a breeze.

Hal drove down this morning and we went to the Private Hole about 8:00. My day had started out kind of shaky when I tried to open the door to where I keep my fishing equipment. I could hear the lock working but the door would not move an inch. Using a punch to push the pins out of the hinges was considered but would be used as a last resort. A thin screwdriver was inserted into the crack between the doors and presto they came open. It has been so wet they were swollen so much they would not open. I took a bar of soap out of my boat and rubbed it on the door faces to make sure they would open the next time. Fishing started out very slowly. The last time I was there it was spinner baits, DT-6’s and worms. This morning it was very light bites on a shaky head worm, or a Texas rigged craw in Hal’s case. The fish started out deep except in one place where the rain water was running in from that accumulated over by the levee. A nice little stream about 18 inches wide. That nice little stream had raised the level about 18 inches. There were some fish there but not that many. They would not hit a moving bait but would lightly bite a worm and start swimming toward the boat. The bites were very hard to detect. By the middle of the morning things were not looking too good. The water warmed from 49  to 58 on the windward bank. Bites were still light however. In the afternoon Hal put on a small KVD 1.5 crankbait and started to catch some on it. Of course I rattled in my bag and came up with a DT-4, the first time I have fished with one of those in years. It would catch fish too. As the evening progressed Hal put on a spinner bait and made that bait work too.  We could tell it was winding down just at the time we should quit, so we did. We caught 40 bass, a grinner, and 2 crappie, one on a shaky head and one on a DT-4 that a relatively small crappie had completely in its mouth. We had two co FOD’s at 3 1/2 each.

I went to early church this morning and when I returned home and let the dogs out it was 10:30. There was enough time for a quick trip to Lake Ferguson so I went for a few hours but only a few because I couldn’t leave the dogs in their pens very long. I made a break for the lake. The boat cranked quickly and ran well considering that the first part of November was the last time it was run. There were only three other bass boats on the ramp. I had a particular stretch of the steep bank in mind to fish. A DT-10 started, a worm was second and a Booyah was the last bait I tried, each on a pass down the bank. I had a nip on both the Booyah and the DT-10 but no hookups. The water temp was 48 to 51 degrees, warm enough for the fish to be a little shallower than I was fishing, so I moved. One took the DT-6 as it passed by a tree. The fish was close to 3 pounds so I pulled out the scales, knowing all the time it was a 2-13. Sure enough it was 2-13 on the money and I had to laugh out loud at myself. When I caught that one so quickly in that spot, I thought I was going to “skin em up” as Mickey likes to say.  But it didn’t happen. I cruised down that bank and had only caught one more small one when the good spots ran out. I went back to the spot where I started and went the other way. A good fish hit the DT-6 but got off after a few seconds. Would not even come up to where I could see it. I kept on down the bank and this one bit. A 5 – 8 with  several black spots. You can see one on the gill covers.

After that I fished down farther but nothing but ideas of other spots that were similar to this one. My time had run out however so I had to leave. The water in the lake had about 3 feet of visibility and was that beautiful Lake Ferguson green color. I’m going back as soon as I can.

But neither Mickey or I have not forgotten how to cast. We Started fishing at the Private Hole about 9:30 in a pretty good wind. Once before early in the year I had a hard time in the private hole after it had been extremely cold so I was worried about a skunk. The water temperature started out at 44 and ended up at 48 degrees. It took Mickey about 5 minutes to run the skunk away and I followed up quickly with the 4.58 pound FOD. All on a DT-6.

Today was a five star day on my fishing app with the notation “good all day”. It was accurate. We started with a DT-6 but also tried a worm and a Booyah. At one point I also put on a swimbait and caught one on it even though most of the bites were rather light. We caught fish on all of the above. Mickey was the first to pull out the Booyah and quickly caught 3. That made me rattle around in my tackle bag and come up with one too. Our offshore spots were not productive for some reason. Most of the fish were caught around some sort of cover so the Booyah was a good choice. The wind was howling all day making handling the boat a pain. It also caused more than one backlash of the serious kind. The wind also causes the fish to move in the Private Hole. They usually go to the bank the wind is blowing to. It locates the fish in other ways, by blowing the bait fish along and the bass locate in ways to get a meal by ambushing them as they come by. For some reason the fish would start to just nip at the spinner bait. That was when we would break out the shaky head worms. The bites with them were on the light side also. A lot of the bites ran toward the boat making setting the hook a little more difficult. All in all it was a great day. We caught a smooth 30 fish.