I went to the private hole this morning for a couple of hours. Richard invited me to Beaverdam to fish but I had to decline his nice invitation due to my construction/flood repair project. I figured I could fish for a couple of hours and then go to the house since I’d already be up there. There was one problem.  I don’t wake up too well and after remembering to think about getting to battery, I still forgot it until I was on the other side of town. It cost 30 minutes of fishing time to go back to get it. When I finally got to the hole and ran the stumptail out from under the boat rack on the bank, I went straight across to a deep point with new laydowns.  Nobody home, but from there I saw some bass chasing shad.  First I threw the clown, a clown colored spook jr. which has a shiny gold body and a shiny red head. Two immediately nailed it but escaped so the substitute was sent in. The sub being a 1/4 ounce red eye shad that immediately started catching. It caught until a tighteye did one of those energy filled shakes right at the boat and snapped my 8 pound test. Now what? There was a “found” bait that looked like a Yozuri imitation that I have caught a lot of fish on in the box so it was put on.  I had used it so much the eye that you hook to had loosened. Some J B Weld had been applied to hold it straight but I couldn’t get it to run straight. It’s going to the scrap heap. Another “found” bait came out. Again it was one that was good at catching fish, a Rebel Deep Crank R which is no longer in production. It too had been repaired because of a leak that caused it to fill with water. Superglue held for a trip but then it leaked again, so out came the J B Weld again. It wouldn’t run straight either. Junk pile bound. Finally I put on one of the “poem” Rattletraps from Craig T. and it was catching too. By then an hour had gone by and the bite was slacking. That battery 30 minutes weighed heavily, since I had caught 9 in the first hour. I ended up with 12 and a FOD of  3 – 9. My DT-6 stash is down to two and the rest of the small crank bait box has taken a pretty good hit. Time for a trip to Bass Pro or maybe an internet order.

My fishing has been so bad lately I got Jackson to “guide” me on Lake Chicot this morning. He’s been burning them up there for the last month. We went straight to one of his good spots and started catching fish, Jackson with a small shallow running Lucky Craft bait first and then a Red Eye Shad.  I started with a Yozuri and they liked it a lot.  I was coming to the boat with a cast and the Yozuri was rattling up a storm when a silver carp ran from the Yozuri and jumped into my lap and then into the boat.  Those things are quick because it slimed my pants and pooped on them as it passed by and of course it made a mess in the bottom of the boat. Scared me to death. A gar grabbed my Yozuri and powered through a fence and broke me off. Next on was a rattletrap but it missed a good many pretty quickly (EDIT: It happened to be the only one in my box with doubtful hooks. The hooks on the other rattletraps are sharp.)  I then put on a Red Eye Shad. The hooks on the Red Eye are superb and will catch anything that comes near. At one time almost every one I caught was hooked on the outside of its mouth.

We had some mishaps today that turned out to be good in the end. In one I had put on a spoon to use to fish through some weeds.  There was a small snarl of line on the reel that I tried to throw out. The line buzzed on the reel and broke taking some line and a Rex spoon with it, and leaving a terrific backlash. I stuck my rod into the water and finally came up with the line, pulled it in and got my bait back.  EDIT:  Believe it or not, I was able to pick the backlash out in about 20 minutes yesterday afternoon without the use of a pocket knife.

Jackson beat that feat. He made a cast and his line snapped with a Red Eye on and a long piece of line attached.  An hour and a half  later I hung the line and we pulled in the bait which had two bass on it.

No biggies but two never the less. There were also three other instances today where I caught two at a time and one where Jackson had on two and got them to the boat where one escaped. By 1:15 we had caught 103 bass. The FOD of course was the lap carp. What is so amazing is the bass have been in the same shallow places for a month. What fun !

I went to Lake Ferguson this afternoon armed with an SD card inserted into my sidescan depthfinder.  Even though the new toy was on board I started fishing seriously. I only caught one in that hour, fooled with the depthfinder a little and continued to fish. In two more hours I caught two more, so three in all. When I got home I downloaded the screenshots from the card to my computer, surprisingly without too much trouble. The first two scans are of a sunken wooden barge. Note the water temperature.

If you click on the picture you can enlarge them and begin to see some bait fish around the end of the barge. In the first picture you can see a little bush on the point just before the barge, some rocks around the point, and a few fish around the edge of the point. The fish show up as white oblong spots.

The third one was taken in the chute where you can see many more fish, some even leaving sound shadows on the bottom where they block off the sound that makes the image. There are a good many bait balls or schools of shad. One is directly under the boat and five more are off to the side. The depthfinder was set to look to the right side of the boat because the transducer is on that side and a better picture is obtained because there is no motor interference. The black portion on the left side of the picture is the distance from the bottom of the boat to the bottom of the lake.  Mine is a first generation model and does not have the resolution of some of the newer ones but I think it’s still pretty neat.

Fishing has taken a backseat to an important project I have going on at present.  The 2011 flood has messed up my fishing from it’s start and I have a way to go until fishing gets back to a more regular schedule. I am raising my house on the river three feet, demolishing the bottom floor and repairing the flood damage in the top floor. This is how the house looked before the flood.

The flood floated off the rear stairs, almost the side stairs, reached the ceiling of the downstairs, got a foot deep upstairs, and floated the garage into the trees destroying it.  The downstairs has been demolished, the house has been raised and the supporting piers are the next step. Here is where we are now.

After the raising is complete, and after repair is started, my fishing may pick up some, especially if the weather cools off.  The temperatures have been brutal. Even though I have been doing no actual work, I have lost enough weight to where my pants are trying to fall off.  I’m going to have to take lessons from those guys you see on the street walking and having to hold their pants up with one hand.

Mickey and I were going to the “private hole” relatively early this morning.   When we hit the first dirt road everything was fine regardless of the rain last night because the road was sandy and not slick.  We made the turn going to the hole and things took a turn for the worse as the road turned to silty clay and was as slick as it could be. We started off to one side but with corrective steering made it back up to the center of the road but then slid off the other side into a low spot where we nestled into the mud. The rut were not deep but the mud was so slick we had no chance to get out.  We assessed the situation, considered our options and then went fishing. We carried the battery a few hundred yards, put it in the boat, trolling motored the boat around to our fishing stuff and then went fishing.  Mickey worked his magic with his crazy shad and caught a couple on top. He was setting a good example so I dug out my spook jr in the clown color, that is gold body and shiny red head, and caught a couple myself. The bass were not hitting  the topwaters like they meant it and finally quit hitting at all so we quit the topwaters.  In the meantime we had called for help. It was arranged that help would come to pull us out at 10:30 so we fished on. Around 9:30 we noticed a pickup in activity. I was using a trusty “found” bait which was a proxy for a DT-6 . It had a crack in the side and was slowly taking on water until it would not run straight. The bait is partially clear so you can see the water in the body of the bait. It went back into the box and was replaced with  DT-6.  Of course as the bite crescendo was reaching its peak we had to leave to pull out the truck.  That’s the way it seems to work. When the truck was extricated from the mud, we returned to the fishing where we continued to catch fish, basically with the same baits with the addition of a Yozuri.  We caught some more including Mickey catching the FOD of 4-3 by hooking it in the tail. He said ” Anybody can catch a 4 pounder in the mouth but it takes a real pro to catch one in the tail. We ended up with 21 and even stuck and muddy we had a great time.

I made a quick trip to Ferguson this morning as it stood at 30.5 feet. It seemed at first that the bite was lagging but as time went on you could tell it was picking up. You would see bass schooling and coming up on the shad.  My time was up at 9:20 because it was getting hot and the man was coming today to start to raise my house at Catfish to maybe keep it out of the flood waters. I caught 8 but none were over two pounds. They seemed to all be deep, not in one place, and maybe suspended out in deep water.  Of course a DT-6 was the starter, and a DT-10 came next, both catching fish but they were not “catch one every cast” concentrated  as I like them to be. Since the house action has started, I doubt if I’ll be fishing much, at least until the weekend.

I went a little earlier today because the other times I fished there the bite had been on for a while when I arrived. When I started pushing the boat off the rack made of pallets I heard a slithering and a stumptail eased into the water from under the boat.  A bad omen. The start time today was 2 p.m. and just rigging up had the perspiration dripping on my shades.  Nothing was going on even at the best spot.  I tried the small crankbaits with no results. Finally I resorted to a worm and managed to catch a couple. Then, in desperation, I put on a Worden Timber Tiger DC-13 thinking the fish were deeper. It caught two immediately and I thought the riddle was solved. A photo of the bait.

The riddle was not solved.  Those were the only ones hungry right then.  The worm was the best producer but it was even slow. As the afternoon progressed the fish activity picked up. The fish were a good size with a lot of 2-13’s. One I weighed had been caught and weighed Saturday or Sunday afternoon because the small membrane on the upper lip was punctured and that’s where I always put the hook on the scales. I managed to catch 5 to take home but most today were over my maximum keeping length of 13 inches. Once I had a small bass coming to the boat and swimming behind it was another between 4 and 5 pounds. I caught 14 in all with the FOD at 3 pounds even.

Mickey and I started a little earlier today than I did yesterday at the “private hole”. We caught some right away on  DT-6’s. Besides DT-6’s, today we fished with Bagley crankbaits, a Rapala Thug, an X- Rap, A Bomber Fat Free Shad, a worm, a Yozuri lipless crankbait, and a shakey head with a finesse worm on it. In short, everything but the kitchen sink. They were biting pretty hard when we first arrived and, as usual, that trailed off as the day progressed. That’s when the assortment of baits came out.  We caught fewer large fish but the FOD was still over 4 at 4-5. There were 5 others over 3 and we invited some under 13 inches home for dinner. The total was 48 bass. That’s 93 in two trips and that kind of gets me out of the funk I was in.  A few days rest will probably do it some good. After that, I’ll be back at it.

Your darkest day is only 24 hours long.  Fishing, for me,  started to change today for the better.  I hit the water at 4:10 and by 6:10 31 bass had made it in the boat. They fell for a DT – 6,  an X-Rap, a 300 Bandit, but most for some sort of “found” Bomber crankbait (EDIT: It is a Rebel Deep Crank R ). The fish finally broke the front hooks off of the Bomber ?? and that’s when I switched to the other three.  I had a 4 – 0 coming to the boat and it had two about the same size escorting it and trying to take the bait out of its mouth. Exciting stuff ! Multiple times there were escorts. Caught a double once but they were small. I was fishing along the bank and heard a commotion in open water behind me.  Upon a cast in that direction out came a 2 1/2 pounder which had been cruising out in the open.  Most bass do not have much for teeth but two today had as many as I’ve ever seen. One happened to be the FOD at 4 – 12. Just as I grabbed it and started to lift it into the boat it shook  and decimated my thumb. It’s still burning from the antibiotic.  There was another one too that had some grinner style teeth. That may be exaggerating a little, but not much. I quit about 7:30 and ended with 45 bass, 3 of which were over 4, and 5 more that were from 3 -14 down to 3.  The trip took place in a private hole that by the rules I’m not supposed to give a name.  I used my garhole boat for the first time since the flood.  Mickey and I plan to go back tomorrow for a rematch.

In the edit to the previous post I said uh-oh Wolf Lake was open to fishing.  I should have stayed home.  The level of the lake was where it has been the last four years when I had wonderful days fishing.  The first place was devoid of any bass action but was full of shad and 12 to 15 inch gars. I finally went down the bank and caught a 2 – 13 on a Booyah. The spot I stopped is one of my favorites on Wolf and is one that usually produces fish of a good size consistently.  A little worried I went to two more good proven places with no results and no visible bass action. This time of year on Wolf Lake the bass congregate on the underwater deltas to feed on the shad as they pass by in the slight current of the lake as it falls. I tried 12 of those places today with DT-6’s and 10’s, worms, a shakey head and a jig all to no avail. I even just fished down the bank with a Booyah and also with a DT-10 throwing from far off the bank. Nothing. I did catch a 4 3/4 cat and a 6 3/4 goo but only 2 bass. I did see one about 4 come up and just kiss my bait early this morning. In the past 4 years I have averaged 24, 47, 69 and 34 bass per trip on Wolf, fishing mostly in these spots. I say this, not to toot my horn, or to relive past accomplishments, but to say I understand Wolf Lake pretty well and it was a very different place today.  I am quizzical as to what the problem was today. Was it just a day when the fish had the lockjaw, or did I just do a bad job of fishing, or was the “small” fish kill on Wolf that was caused by the high water earlier this year larger than people thought? I hope not the fish kill because Wolf Lake was/is full of bass.  The people with houses on Wolf Lake like people here have suffered flood damage. I’m going to raise my house at Catfish. Here is a photo of a trailer on Wolf Lake that I think was raised just before it flooded. It is sitting on  timbers stacked up on both ends. Click on the photo to enlarge it.