Birthday Bass

I had the pleasure of fishing with a father and his son today on a local lake for smallies. Tony was treating his 9 year old Matt to a day of fishing on his birthday. The weather was beautiful once more as clouds & sunshine greeted us for our run up the lake. Air temps began around 70 degrees but ended more like 90 degrees by mid afternoon. It turned out to be a real scorcher with high humidity in the end! The water temps were around the same as yesterday near 78 degrees all over. The fishing began a little slow as we spend almost an hour with only a few bites. Tony did manage to land a real bonus Walleye about 5 pounds on a senko fished almost dead sticked. The bass were definitely there as we saw plenty of big smallmouth just swimming all around. The only way we could get them to take was by practically leaving the bait on the bottom and letting them swim it off. I decided that we were going to try another area and see if we could get into some active fish. We finally got into more aggressive bass as both Tony & his son Matt were seeing action on senko’s. Matt probably lost the best fish of almost 5 pounds when it went airborne and threw the hook. We did manage to catch several, but nothing larger that 3 pounds or so. I decided that there were just too many big fish in the first area and we went back to see if they had changed their mood. Once again there were more seen than caught, but at least we were hooking into a few of the better fish this time. One fish even pulled a rod into the lake as Matt was reeling in another bass up front. I threw a marker out and got the rod back after we finished with the other one. There was definitely a fish on the end of the rod as I brought it back into the boat. Another firedrill once again! It was to be a short day as Tony was to be heading up north and by 2:00 PM we were done. A pretty good day for the time spent on the water with a dozen or more fish caught & released & a bonus walleye too!