Willard S. Marina...Hot - Not 7-9-24

[TubeDude]

I’ve been “confined to quarters” for the past few weeks…nursing a problem eye and taking care of my wife who is recovering from surgery.  My daughter offered to spend the morning with TubeBabe so I could go fishing.  Raised that girl right.
 
Hit the south marina and launched by 7ish.  Air temp 67 soaring to 80 by departure time at 10:30 .  Water temps went from 73  to  75.   Pretty good clarity in the water.
 

Needed to be home by noonish so I hit it hard and heavy.  Started with crawler rigs…behind a buzz blade and behind a crankbait.  Got fish on both.  Small wipers and a couple of cats.  But got a tangle on one cat and due to inefficiency of depth perception with my left eye I just put up the rod rather than fighting the tangle.
 

Then, my motor stopped.  Started checking wiring connections and found the one going into the on-off switch had worked loose.  Even with my problem eye, I got it loosely connected…but had to keep redoing it through the morning since I didn’t have any new fittings.  Bother.
 
Tried trolling some small cranks.  Had a couple of hits…prolly from mini wipers.  No bendos.  Went back to dragging baited lures…some with worms, others with minnows.  Got more of the usual suspects.
 
Finally got around to throwing and dragging a tandem rig…with two gulp minnows on different jig heads.  Got more wiperettes…including one double that felt good until I saw what it was.  That rig also got my last and biggest cat…about 23”…just as I was heading in to the ramp.  That was also my largest cat.  I had kept 3 but when I got to the ramp that last one was the only one left in my basket...and his head was stuck in the hole that had allowed the two previous smaller ones to escape.  Okay.  Still enough for dinner.

 
Only a few boats out today.  Guessing the action overall has dropped off a bit.  Didn’t see any big shad balls on TV but I suspect they are somewhere.  A couple of the little wipers I brought in were barfing up some inch plus shadlets.