Educational Fishing 101

Richard and his son, Max fished with me on Lake St-Louis today for bass and experienced one of the most difficult days so far this season. Mother nature decided to throw us a cross wind from the W/NW at 15 to 20 knots causing some 3 footers & making boat control almost impossible. Add this to the electrical storm we experienced last night along with a cold front and we just had a recipe for disaster. It’s not that the fish weren’t there, but that they were really reluctant to take our offerings in most all places we fished. The first area only produced about 5 bass with the largest going slightly over 3 pounds on senko’s. There were several missed strikes as well, telling me that they just weren’t in the mood to bite. Instead of waiting them out, I decided to switch locations and try for some that were. This next location gave up only a few fish as well but they were all decent smallmouth. Once again, we witnessed some of the largest ones just cruising around with no interest in feeding. The best thing that happened today was that Max learned how fish with a spinning outfit and his dad was able to retire his spin cast rod & reel. In fact, Max was casting probably better that anyone I had ever taught before with total line control on every cast he made. Being only eight years old, this is a major accomplishment! The winds reached their maximum while were in this area and it just got out of control trying to fish and hold the boat so I decided another change was needed. I ran a little further and tried another area that had been producing really well in the last few weeks in hopes that the shore would protect us from the howling winds. It was a little easier to fish this area but with the exception of Richard hooking up on his first cast, that’s all we had. He brought up a couple of other bass following the hooked one and I tried to get a double hook up. Unfortunately, the others lost interest and disappeared into the weeds without even a sniff. One more spot for smallies produced a couple more bass and then we decided to change up and try for largemouth in a more sheltered area. Richard drew first blood with a nice largemouth taken on a scum frog and we thought we were really going to get into them. This was not to be and we spend a while between fish. A few large bass were spooked in this jungle of vegetation and one more nice largemouth was landed on a scum frog but that was all they wrote. We took a few pictures of these bucketheads and packed it in for the day. The ride back to the ramp was a little splashy with the cross current winds and we all got a nice shower along the way. This was not a great day to be on the water, but anytime you can get out there is a good thing. Despite the low numbers of bass we were still able to land about a dozen fish up to 3.5 pounds and made the best of a difficult day.