Refining The Mix

Norm was back again today, for the first time on this local lake and really looking foreword to catching some smallies. We had a beautiful day in the forecast with sunshine and temps in the 80’s predicted, along with a slight breeze from the east of about 5 knots. The water temps were about 64 degrees in most areas and actually hit 70 degrees in some others. I thought the top water bite would be hot so we began throwing lures on the surface for a while with only a few takers. I switched up to a jig and started catching just about everything that swims, but they were nothing to brag about. It wasn’t until Norm started throwing a shallow running crank-bait that the bigger bass started to come aboard and this was great to see. We refined the areas afterwards with some soft plastics and began catching even better fish with the largest going somewhere around 4.5 pounds. He caught a real mix of fish today with everything from perch & rock bass to smallies, walleye, pike and even a gar pike. Some of the smallmouth were post spawn while others were definitely in the pre spawn mode. I’m sure that if we had of been able to fish everywhere that I wanted today, we would have had plenty of big fish. Unfortunately with the tournament scheduled for this weekend, there were bass boats all over the lake and I was limited to the areas I wanted to fish. At least the season started a little early with the special “Catch & Release” fishing bumping the opener regularly set for this coming Friday. Overall a pretty good day with our best five fish going in the high teens. Can’t complain with that!!!