Saturday Flotilla on Utah Lake

[TubeDude]

[cool][font "Verdana,Arial,Helvetica"][black][size 1][#0000ff]Met up with Theekillerbee and drove to Lindon in his rig. Found an anxious svpdgcar (Gary) waiting for us with his new tube on top of his car. Nobody else was there yet, so we did some show and tell on tube rigging and got ready to luanch. [/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]FlyFishingMoose and UncleRay showed up just as we were ready to hit the water. They followed us out a little later in their inflatable raft.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]TKB scored the first fish, a nice 4# channel cat. We thought it was the first of many. NOT. That was his only cat of the day, but it was a nice one.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]I had been soaking minnows without results. Put on a bit strip of carp meat, casted out, rinsed my hands and took a bite of my breakfast sandwich. Yep. Had a hard whack on my bait and line peeled off the reel. Barely maintained control enough to cover the sandwich and stuff it inside my pouch before grabbing the rod, flipping the bail, waiting for the line to come tight and WHAM. A 23 inch channel that weighed 4.4 pounds. [/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]Kept trying the bite of sandwich trick over and over with no further results. After about an hour I had another runner and set the hook into something that felt a LOT bigger and more active than the first one. Turned out to be a 24 inch cat that weighed 4.7 pounds. The bend in my rod and the fish turning me around in my tube several times was enough to bring IconoclasticPaul cruising over in his boat to watch the battle.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]Gary was still getting used to his craft and was not set up like he plans to be in the near future. I think he had a good time, but had to leave to hook up with fishluvr for a planned trip to Scofield. Hope he did better with the troutskis.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]TKB and I had agreed that if the fishing did not improve, about 11:30, that we would make an early day of it. However, I began tossing one of my silver spinners and nailed a couple of white bass. TKB had expressed a desire to score some white bass, since he had never fished any waters that had them. I called him over and told him to set up in a certain spot and start pitching small silver spinners. He immediately got hooked up, and lit up. I stayed around until I had about a half dozen for tonight's scampi (YUM), releasing a few small ones. [/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]I left TKB to play with his new friends while I paddled back to the area I had hooked the cats earlier. As I got out into kitty country, I watched a guy in a small yellow kayak doing mortal battle with a nice cat. I had to chuckle when I watched him try to tame that beast with a little trout net. He "got 'er done" though, and posed for a pic. I invited him to drop in on BFT and told him I was adding kayaks as a part of the float tubing board.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]I couldn't buy another hit and TKB finally had all the fun he could stand with the whities, keeping only enough for a good feed for the family.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]The water temp was 58 when we launched at 7:30 and it had warmed to 65 by 2:30 take out time. Another few warm days (in between typhoons) and the kitties should be thinking about frolicing in the rocks.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]By the way, we noticed some folks scoring a few nice white bass off the ends of the dikes at Lindon as we were coming in. No evidence of walleyes or cats, but I am guessing they probably came in later. There was a surprising amount of boat traffic and some bigguns at that.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]Met doggonefishin' at the launch ramp coming in. He had gone out to the bubbleup and reported that fishing out there was sparse today. However, he had taken one nice cat, and had some crappies and whities he had taken while playing inside the harbor.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]It was a nice day and got to meet some more BFTers (and a potential BFTer). [/#0000ff]
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[Theekillerbee]

It was a lot of fun getting the toon out in the water for the first time this year. I've been spoiled in the past using a trolling motor, but fear of "the man" kept me under my own power (no registration). All I can say is that I'm very glad I had some oars, cause my legs were getting tired! They saved my bacon. There was a breeze most of the day, so we had to work to stay in one area while whuppin' the whites. I would have had to get out and swim to get back to the marina if I was stuck using only leg power for the whole trip. It was a blast. Gonna munch some fish tomorrow night!
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