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.