On the way home from fishing today (3:30 p.m.), I had an air temperature reading on my F-150 thermometer of 88 degrees. It did hit 89 degrees at the intersection of Columbia Avenue (Rt. 23) and Millersville Road (Rt. 741, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. That was a degree or two hotter than yesterday at the same time.
We set a heat record yesterday and I am assuming we once again set an all-time heat record today for this date... Not bad for the beginning of April.
Word has it that the Big Mammas have already started to spawn. From what Steve and I saw today, that definitely seems on target. These hot days have spurred Mother Nature to push some of the bigger fish onto the beds.
Steve had hand surgery this past week and has been unable to get out on his own. So yesterday while Josh and I were fishing, Steve and I texted back and forth and I invited him to get out on the water with me today.
I wasn't sure if he would fish or not under the circumstances, but he brought three rods and his secret springtime color tubes along with him. He's a real trooper. I'm are glad he did.
We launched around 8:30 a.m. and headed north from the ramp. We hit the west shoreline. The water temp was 59.7 degrees and the air temp was about 62 degrees. There was a slight breeze out of the southwest. It later shifted and was blowing extremely hard down river on us and made boat control a bit difficult.
We found that the water was a murky green look. After checking the turbidity of the water, Steve choose a darker colored tube and I picked up my trusty ole' spinnerbait. I'm always looking for a spinnerbait or crankbait bite, but today wasn't the day!
Steve hit the first few fish on that tube... a walleye and a fall fish. But where are the smallies?
We fished for quite some time before the first smallie hit Steve's tube.
After his third or fourth smallie, I laid the hardware down and moved to the tube. It took a few minutes before I finally had a nice chunky bass. Steve wanted to take a pic of her because he loved the coloration...
We stayed along this shoreline until about 11:30 a.m. It was close to lunchtime. So, we headed further north to an island and beached the boat for a few minutes to relax, talk, eat our lunches, and prepare for the afternoon.
After lunch, we fished an eddy just north of where we had beached the boat. We nailed two bass in this eddy. Hmmmmm... These two came rather quickly.
We have a really great spot that we wanted to fish before the end of our adventure. Around 1:30 p.m., we headed to the spot and we're really glad we did. We landed over 25 bass from this area. They were all what I call "Hopefuls". These are bass in the 12" to 14" range that are the future of our fishery. These "cookie cutter" bass were hitting the lure with a tremendous "THUNK". What a great feeling!
Today was a 45+ fish day and by far the best we've had fishing out my boat this spring. Here are some pics of the bass we caught...
A Double Hook Up... Steve's fish is on the left and mine is on the right. I won't mention who's was the biggest (Steve's smallie).
Here is Steve holding the bigger of the two...
Check out the dark spot on the face of this bass. We also caught two bass that had darker left-sided tail ends. An unusual marking for these fish.
The marking was over the right eye of the fish. It reminded me of Petey from the "Our Gang" movies... but in smallmouth species. :)
Here is the biggest fish that we caught all day. Look how fat this "Little Girl" is. We dubbed her "Hope". She measured at 14.75".
Nothing we caught today was legal(18") and nothing was over 15" long.
Earlier, I had mentioned that what we experienced today would support the fact that the Big Mammas we starting to spawn. We did not fish any spawning areas and thus, we landed all these soon-to-be spawners.
Another thing that supports the spawn is this...
That temp was taken around 2:00 p.m. The temp rose from the earlier 59.7 degrees to 63.1 degrees... A 3.4 degree temperature increase throughout the day!
Thanks to Steve and his selection of tubes, we made a decent day into a great day!
I may be out of the water once again tomorrow before the T-storms move into the county. I haven't heard too much about rain amount, but it doesn't seem like it will be too much right now. We'll see.
Take care,
Dad
