08-14-2017, 09:31 PM
Last week I got an email from Doug, a longtime friend and fishing buddy who now lives in AZ. He said he would be in town Saturday and so I rearranged my work schedule and we decided to go to Lincoln beach and chase catfish. By the time Saturday rolled around the group had grown to 4 people. Ken, a friend Doug’s, would be joining us along with Doug’s nephew Nick.
We got the Lincoln ramp a little before 6 AM and there was already someone there! You can probably guess who it was. I got to visit with BLK and compare notes before he launched and head for one of his spots. Good to see him again.
We motored out of the harbor and then dropped the electric and trolled over toward the springs hoping to get some fresh WB for bait. No whites cooperated (that we noticed) and we anchored in 6 FOW. While I was setting the anchors Nick started laughing. He held up the spinner he had been trolling and on it was a white about 4” long. “I’ll just throw this tiny thing back.” He joked. “No, that’s perfect bait size,” I told him.
Initially we used frozen WB from my last trip, set beneath slip bobbers to reduce the number of snags. It only took 10 minutes for the first cat to find the cut bait. Nick again got the fish, a channel about 21”. He was surprised when we said they usually average a couple inches larger. Half an hour later Doug got a cat about 23” and shortly after that Ken got one about 21”.
From then on the fish came fairly consistently, but it wasn’t hot fishing. We averaged about 3 cats an hour. I usually use a 30-minute rule when catfishing and several times we would talk about moving except that we were catching more whites than catfish. Ken, Nick and Doug were all throwing spinners with one rod while the watched their floats on the other. First Ken got 2 or 3 and then Nick and then Doug and the little schools just seemed to wander by.
I wasn’t “HOT” like other recent reports from other parts of the lake, but it was consistent enough that we rarely went 10 minutes with some kind of a fish on. We swapped lot of stories from times when Doug and I were younger and just had a great time.
Altogether we got 12-15 channels and about twice that many whites. All that cats came on cut WB, most of it fresh. We missed lots of fish on the bobber rods and most were whites trying to gobble large chunks of their less fortunate relatives. Almost a third of the whites were caught on the catfish baits. The rest came on spinners in colors ranging for silver to gold to “sesame street,” as Nick called one with multiple colors not found in nature. Everything was released except for the few whites we kept for bait.
We headed back to the dock about 11 AM. Water temps were in the mid 70’s the whole trip and the bulk of the fish were in 5-6 FOW. On boat anchored between us and the first spring and caught way more whites than we did, but only a few cats.
I wasn’t “HOT” like other recent reports from other parts of the lake, but it was consistent enough that we rarely went 10 minutes without some kind of a fish on. We swapped lot of stories from times when Doug and I were younger and made a few plans for future adventures. All in all we just had a great time with old friends and new ones.
[signature]
We got the Lincoln ramp a little before 6 AM and there was already someone there! You can probably guess who it was. I got to visit with BLK and compare notes before he launched and head for one of his spots. Good to see him again.
We motored out of the harbor and then dropped the electric and trolled over toward the springs hoping to get some fresh WB for bait. No whites cooperated (that we noticed) and we anchored in 6 FOW. While I was setting the anchors Nick started laughing. He held up the spinner he had been trolling and on it was a white about 4” long. “I’ll just throw this tiny thing back.” He joked. “No, that’s perfect bait size,” I told him.
Initially we used frozen WB from my last trip, set beneath slip bobbers to reduce the number of snags. It only took 10 minutes for the first cat to find the cut bait. Nick again got the fish, a channel about 21”. He was surprised when we said they usually average a couple inches larger. Half an hour later Doug got a cat about 23” and shortly after that Ken got one about 21”.
From then on the fish came fairly consistently, but it wasn’t hot fishing. We averaged about 3 cats an hour. I usually use a 30-minute rule when catfishing and several times we would talk about moving except that we were catching more whites than catfish. Ken, Nick and Doug were all throwing spinners with one rod while the watched their floats on the other. First Ken got 2 or 3 and then Nick and then Doug and the little schools just seemed to wander by.
I wasn’t “HOT” like other recent reports from other parts of the lake, but it was consistent enough that we rarely went 10 minutes with some kind of a fish on. We swapped lot of stories from times when Doug and I were younger and just had a great time.
Altogether we got 12-15 channels and about twice that many whites. All that cats came on cut WB, most of it fresh. We missed lots of fish on the bobber rods and most were whites trying to gobble large chunks of their less fortunate relatives. Almost a third of the whites were caught on the catfish baits. The rest came on spinners in colors ranging for silver to gold to “sesame street,” as Nick called one with multiple colors not found in nature. Everything was released except for the few whites we kept for bait.
We headed back to the dock about 11 AM. Water temps were in the mid 70’s the whole trip and the bulk of the fish were in 5-6 FOW. On boat anchored between us and the first spring and caught way more whites than we did, but only a few cats.
I wasn’t “HOT” like other recent reports from other parts of the lake, but it was consistent enough that we rarely went 10 minutes without some kind of a fish on. We swapped lot of stories from times when Doug and I were younger and made a few plans for future adventures. All in all we just had a great time with old friends and new ones.
[signature]