My bass fishin buddy Bruce Slaven returned to the ranch Monday for another shot at catching a few bass. Since the days are a little longer than they were on our December trip, we managed 6 hours of fishing the first afternoon. Despite harvesting over 250 bass from the lake in 2020, the catch numbers were still pretty impressive. In the magic window between when the sun disappears behind the hills and dark, the bite really turned on with a fish every cast on topwaters and soft plastics deposited anywhere along the edge of the lake. When we finally called it a day we had landed 106 bass. No jumbos, but still plenty of fun.
On Tuesday, we managed a full 12 hour day of fishing. During the morning session, we picked up 75 bass. We switched over to fishing the north end of the lake right after lunch and landed another 50 fish before heading back to the south end. That included my big fish of the trip a 22 incher. Didn’t have my scale, but according to the size charts, that fish should have weighed a little over 6 lbs. While fishing back on the south end, had two “double” catches. The first, a type which happens often in the lake, was where Bruce caught two bass at the same time on a topwater chugger. Unfortunately one pulled off before I could get out my camera. The second was a little more unusual. We were both fishing soft plastics casting into shallow water, and our baits splashed down about 6′ apart. I had a bite first and paused a second before setting the hook. Almost immediately after my line came tight, Bruce had a tap and set the hook on his fish. When we both got our lines to the boat I thought one of the fish had tangled our lines together. Both lines went to the same fish, a 2 lb bass, but the lines were not tangled. Instead, both our hooks were inside the the same fishes mouth. We each gave that fish a big thank you and returned him to the lake so hopefully we could do that again some day. We ended up the afternoon with another good pre dark flurry and 115 fish on the clicker. That meant that we had a total catch of 191 bass for the day. That beat our previous one day record of 174, set on our last trip in December.
On Wednesday morning, we only fished about 3 hours and threw mostly with Ribbits and Horny Toads. The bite was definitely slower since it was the fourth time in three days we had worked the same shorelines, but we still picked up another 36 fish. We both got a good laugh out of the fact that for prior to recent years any trip with over a dozen bass would have been spectacular. Now we consider catching a dozen bass an hour to be a slow day.
That brought our total catch for this trip to 333 which was a little less than the 395 we caught back in December. So to help things along for our next fishing expedition, I took time to add 25lbs of fertilizer to the lake to pump up the food chain.
As always, another great fishing trip (like many others in our 54 years of fishing this lake together) with my good friend Bruce.