A Bit of Jet Lag

For the next five days I was going to be fishing with Takeshi, all the way from Japan! He had made the trip a few years ago and wanted to come back, but fishing the Bassmasters had made it too difficult and had to wait longer than expected. He had travelled in alone this time, so I offered him a stay at my place to cut the expenses and he gladly accepted. We began the first day on a local lake in unseasonably warm temperatures that climbed to the upper 70’s by days end. It felt more like Florida than Canada, but we weren’t complaining! I had been having incredibly good high fish days lately and didn’t expect anything to change while he was here. Water temps were still around 58 degrees and sunshine greeted us all day long. A light breeze from the SW caused a ripple on the clear water and helped with the bite. Tak caught fish on just about everything he threw, but tubes were the best lures of choice. He did manage to get into a number of quality bass on both crankbaits and jerkbaits and this allowed us to cover water better. Sometime in the mid afternoon, he locked up with a real beauty on a crankbait and I knew this was what he was looking for. It was in the high fives and went 21.25 inches in length. It was a real football with an enormous girth as well! This fish had been holding in shallow water right on a drop off and nailed the crankbait as it passed by. What a beauty! We travelled all over the water and every place we stopped today produced fish. I’m sure that by the end of the day there were at least 100 smallies landed and plenty of others lost too. Even with the “Jet Lag” he was suffering from, he managed to beat on the fish pretty good. All in all a great first day of fishing!