The Calm After The Storm

After a couple of days away from the water due to absolutely horrible weather conditions, I was back out today with Brian. He had joined me on Monday and had a blast catching plenty of quality smallies and was really looking foreword to getting into them once again. The weather was a balmy 28 degrees at the start of the morning and heated up to a heat wave of 34 degrees by days end. Fortunately, the sun was out for most of the day as the winds were about 10 to 20 K from the W/SW. I kind of figured that with all the rain, wind & snow that fell in the last couple of days that the water temps would have fallen and I was right. They had dropped below 50 degrees and were now hovering at 48.6, considerably lower than a few days earlier. It was a tougher than usual bite in the morning and I wasn’t surprised! We really had to slow down our presentations and literally crawl our jigs in order to get bit. Fishing a little bit deeper also managed to produce more strikes, but the fish seemed to be slightly smaller than expected. There was one fish however that started out small and by the time it came to the net, it had grown to over 5 pounds. Not much of a fight on that one! Brian was getting into bass of all sizes and was just happy to be on the water again, catching fish. It was a change from all the trout & salmon he was use to from Alaska! I was pretty sure that once the sun warmed the water slightly by midday that the afternoon bite would be significantly better than the morning bite and was right. We started getting into them more and the quality was definitely better after 1 or 2 o’clock. From that point on, there were 3’s & 4’s coming in most of the time and oh how the time flew by! Before we knew it, it was time to go and after a couple more fish, we headed back to the ramp, completing another successful day. Although Brian may not have beaten his personal best from Monday, he did still manage to land many quality bass and definitely had a great day on the water.