The Perfect Misery Day

This morning I had the pleasure of fishing with Scott, Shawn and Lorne from Ontario. I had fished with Scott the past two falls and this time he treated both his father in law & brother in law to a day on the water. He had been bragging about how well he does every time he fishes with me and they wanted to see if it was true. Unfortunately, we had a miserable day to prove anything as it rained all day long. It was just horrible and really windy too! Its no wonder that there was nobody else fishing, as we were the only crazy’s on the water today! I figured that with three guys in terrible conditions, they were all going to be throwing jigs all day long. I didn’t want a repeat of earlier in the year when someone buried a treble hook into his buddy’s ear and stuck with the single hooks today. They were a little slow in getting started, not having dragged jigs along the bottom for bass before and I demonstrated with a hook-up on my example cast. Once they saw this, they had the confidence and the games began. It wasn’t long after that everyone began hooking their own fish, but most of them were coming off due to either poor hook sets or rods not bent enough afterwards. These are strong fish and you really have to get that hook buried and keep the slack out of the line in order to land them. There were 4 great spots today that produced many a fish and the other areas had some action, but a little slower than I wanted. The biggest problem was the rain and dirty water! I knew that if they had any chance of getting into them that they would have to fish slow and right on the bottom. After a few hours they were all holding their own and quite competitive too, I might add! There was a lot of trash being talked and some of it came back to bite them in the butt on occasion. I’m not really sure who caught the biggest or the most, but I do know who lost the most! Unfortunately, I’m sworn to secrecy and can’t tell! All I know is that everybody caught plenty of small, medium and even large fish today and that’s all that counts. As I said to them, “for every fish you lose, there’s 10 more waiting to eat your jig”! Apparently this was pretty accurate as Scott missed 3 strikes and finally locked up on the fourth, to land a four-pounder. I think that by the end of the day, it was about 50/50 as far as the landing losing ratio goes. All I know is that it was more than I had expected under these conditions and would have been happy with just 25 or 50 bites. All in all, despite the weather, it was a fantastic day on the water and nobody got hurt!!