Just Playing Around

With the daylight savings time going into effect overnight, I was in no hurry to get on the water this morning. Temperatures fell to about 20 degrees or –7 and it would be a brisk morning to say the least. I purposely didn’t have any bookings set up for today in order that I could take my wife out for a day of bass fishing and the warmer it would be, the better! A buddy of mine tagged along as well and the three of us hit the water somewhere around 9:30 A.M. We were surprised to find that the air temps were still hovering around the freezing mark when we arrived and along with that, there was an E wind of 5 to 10 K making it feel ever colder. Bluebird skies were a welcomed sight as that was all we had to help with the temps. The water was still around 48 degrees and with the aid of the sunshine, climbed all the way up to 48.5 by the end of the day. I think it was on Christiane’s second cast that she was locked up and a 3.5-pound smallie was her reward. I knew there were plenty of other fish in this area, but we were unable to convince the others into committing and left shortly after with only short strikes. In the next area, Rick was tight to a big fish almost immediately as I drifted through a deeper weed & rock zone and soon landing a 5.7 pound bass. Not bad for a starter fish eh! Although the bites weren’t fast & furious as we like them to be, there were still plenty of fish caught throughout the day. Christiane had a slower day than usual and finally managed to start hooking big fish later in the afternoon. The bites were quite subtle and if you weren’t really in touch, you just missed them. Lots of fish were picking up the baits and almost immediately letting them go instead of sucking them in and this was making it more difficult to detect. Although there were lulls in the day, we knew that at any moment another 5 pounder could fall victim to our jigs and waited anxiously on every cast. In the end, with the changing of the clocks, we were calling it a day just around 4 o’clock and heading back to the dock. It was probably one of the coldest days so far this fall and add the east wind to the mixture and any skin exposed cooled off quickly. We still managed to get a number of quality bass and that’s all that counts. Great day anyway!!