08-30-2016, 01:31 PM
Jon, a fellow member of BFT joined me on Willard yesterday. I had visions of a great day of catching lots of wipers on mussels, like I did back in May.
We got on the water at 10 AM and we slowly moved out of the South Marina, using the Minn Kota, dragging mussels. I saw zero fish on the fish finder and we got no bites. Moved north for a few hundred yards and still no action.
Fired up the outboard and moved to the south end of Freeway Bay and tried moving around from shallow to about 8 feet with no action at all.
Decided to try trolling. Trolled past the island (no marker buoy these days) and all the way across to the west dike and again nothing. Tried bottom bouncing along the deep channel on the west side, just south of the light pole. That also didn't work.
I told Jon that I was going to at least catch a bass and was going to cast the rocks for awhile. Moved over to the rocks and proceeded to cast a drop shot with 1/2 of a crawler, and Jon did the same, except that he used a bobber. First cast for both of us and we landed nice channel cats. Long story short, we slowly moved along the dike and proceeded to catch at least 70 channel cats and two crappie. To keep from snagging up as often, I also switched to a bobber. I decided it would be even more fun to catch them on my loaned-to-me-for-awhile fly rod, so I broke it out and we (I let Jon try it for awhile) caught about 1/3 of them on the fly rod.[
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I was surprised at the size of the cats. The average size was around 18 inches and the largest went 22 inches. They all put up a hard fight and although it wasn't the day that I expected it was still a great day. First time fishing with Jon, but it won't be my last.
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We got on the water at 10 AM and we slowly moved out of the South Marina, using the Minn Kota, dragging mussels. I saw zero fish on the fish finder and we got no bites. Moved north for a few hundred yards and still no action.
Fired up the outboard and moved to the south end of Freeway Bay and tried moving around from shallow to about 8 feet with no action at all.
Decided to try trolling. Trolled past the island (no marker buoy these days) and all the way across to the west dike and again nothing. Tried bottom bouncing along the deep channel on the west side, just south of the light pole. That also didn't work.
I told Jon that I was going to at least catch a bass and was going to cast the rocks for awhile. Moved over to the rocks and proceeded to cast a drop shot with 1/2 of a crawler, and Jon did the same, except that he used a bobber. First cast for both of us and we landed nice channel cats. Long story short, we slowly moved along the dike and proceeded to catch at least 70 channel cats and two crappie. To keep from snagging up as often, I also switched to a bobber. I decided it would be even more fun to catch them on my loaned-to-me-for-awhile fly rod, so I broke it out and we (I let Jon try it for awhile) caught about 1/3 of them on the fly rod.[
] I was surprised at the size of the cats. The average size was around 18 inches and the largest went 22 inches. They all put up a hard fight and although it wasn't the day that I expected it was still a great day. First time fishing with Jon, but it won't be my last.
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