This has been a long stretch of fishing, fer shure!
I have been on the water 9 days out of the past 11. It all started April 5th when I fished the Susquehanna Flats with Mike Burton and landed a few nice largemouth bass on a lipless crankbait. (By the way, Mike won his club's tournament this past Sunday from that spot on, you guessed it, a lipless crankbait. Way to go, Mike!) Then, for three days straight, I fished the Susquehanna River below Harrisburg, Pa. From April 11 to April 14, I was on the North Branch of the Susquehanna River with Josh chasing smallies in the "Land of Oz". Yesterday, I was back out on the river below Harrisburg, Pa. on a beautiful blue bird sky day.
It was rather cold in the morning when I headed to George's for breakfast. I hung around the restaurant for about 90 minutes eating breakfast, reading the morning newspaper, and doing the puzzles to keep my mind active. You never know at my age when the mind wants to give out on you... LOL.
I got to the ramp around 9:00 a.m. and checked out the condition of the water. It had cleared nicely and had fallen about a foot since my last outing. The predictor showed the water level at 4.67' at the Harrisburg gauge around 8:00 a.m. So, I took time to retie lures since I still had my NB specials tied on from our trip north.
I finally got on the water and fishing around 9:30 a.m. I ran north to a few spots I like in the early spring and proceeded to nail this beautiful 18.5" smallie on a plastic tube...
I have a new camera and I'm still learning how to use it outside in the bright sunshine. Another thing that compounded the problem was that I just bought a better seat for myself to fish from on the front deck. I have to now learn where on that seat I can place this new camera and get shots like the old camera I used. As you can see, I'm still learning. Here was my second failed attempt to show the entire fish...
You can tell by these botched photos that the fish was a "chunko"! Oh well, I hope to get better with more practice.
She appeared to have spawned out because her belly was gone... She was well fed, though.
This bass was a good lesson in perseverance. I caught this girl from an island that I first had tossed a spinnerbait while drifting down river. I turned around and using my trolling motor, moved back upriver tossing a lipless crankbait... Nada! On my return drift down river, I picked up the plastic tube and caught her in a spot I had just tossed the spinnerbait and lipless crank into. She didn't want the other two, but she slammed the tube!
The water temp had dropped over 10 degrees since we had those nice warm days last week. The drop didn't seem to have much effect my catch today and I put a dozen bass into the boat.
What I found cool was that I caught bass on every different style of lure I threw... a plastic tube, crankbait, jerkbait, and spinnerbait. I am not a "numbers" man, but I see myself as someone who will try as many lures as possible to see what kind of bite I can get going. I find it exciting to catch fish on a number of lures rather than a ton of fish on one bait.
The bass are starting to become more active in chasing moving lures. A recent tournament in this area proved that with the winners tossing a moving lure.
We might see a great spring of fishing like we did last year. Last year, we had an early warm spell that spurred the big mommas to spawn early. They recovered and we had a great spring of catching big fish on moving baits.
Take care!
Dad
