The Hurricane Continues

Herve & his son, Thomas were fishing with me today and we met at the ramp shortly after 7:00 A.M. I had been out the day before searching for more walleye & pike spots in order to get them into fish today and definitely found them. Today however, we were back to the hurricane winds and floaters all over the water column. Although it looked pretty rough out there, I thought I would give it a try anyway. Winds were out of the west blowing at 20 knots or better when we began and in a couple of hours closer to 30 knots. By then I realized that it just wasn’t going to happen on this lake and decided to jump ponds. We had caught one bass & one walleye in all the time we had been fishing and I had probably cleaned all the rods a couple of hundred times. I literally went from one rod to the other and couldn’t keep up. We arrived at the second lake around 10:30 and were fishing shortly after in similar conditions. The only thing here though was that I was able to fish areas for bass casting different baits. Thomas hooked the first bass on a spinnerbait and it was pushing 5 pounds. Definitely his personal best! He also landed several largemouth bass before his father, Thomas got into the game. His first smallie hit a soft, plastic jerk bait and committed suicide. At around 3 pounds it was nice but not quite photo worthy! Senko’s were thrown into the game and soon several more smallies were coming aboard along with a few more largemouth. Herve even managed to bring a nice one aboard that too was pushing five pounds and this time photo worthy. A few quick pics and right back to the lake. We fished several more areas, all the while getting into fish both large and medium in size. Most of them were smallmouh bass but some largemouth were caught right along with the smallies too. I decided late in the afternoon that we would give the trolling another shot and tried for northerns in one area closer to the ramp. This turned out to be an identical replica of the morning troll on the other lake with huge rollers and tons of floating vegetation. Needless to say, it didn’t last long! After checking & cleaning the lines 25 to 50 times each I just packed it in and called it a day. Jumping lakes was definitely the way to go as we managed to catch plenty of big smallies in just the few hours out. I hope next time the weather cooperates a bit better because trolling would definitely pick up the numbers for them. Tough day but Mother Nature didn’t totally win this time!!