08-09-2009, 09:00 AM
My son and I finally got a chance to go fishing saturday. One of the few times we&#39;ve been able to get away this year. All I can say is it was a great day. We hit the lake a little late, about 8:30 AM, but it was beautiful weather. The weather conditions were sunny that morning with increasing clouds till about noon at which time it was completely cloudy. The lake elevation was about 358.5&#39; or about 1-1/2&#39; below summer pool. Water temp was 82 degrees most everywhere. We didn&#39;t catch large numbers of fish but did catch what I would consider a good size number of quality bass. We tried several patterns but all of them were related to some type ledge or drop off. It was easy to tell from watching the graph that the fish were hanging out on the brake lines in 10&#39; to 12&#39;. So we concentrated on targeting that depth. The pattern that worked best was fishing a shaky head type rig just along the top edge of the drop then pulling it off into the deeper portion of the drop. (By the way all of this was on the river, not in the creeks) Green pumpkin and junebug was the color of choice. Since I used to be a tournament fisherman the best way for me to describe the quality of fish is to say our best 5 fish weighed right at 22 pounds. Thats real good for me. In total we caught roughly 25 - 30 bass most of which were keeper size (15&quot; minimum) We had 3 bass that weighed over 5 pounds each and 9 or 10 that was above 3 pounds. A real good day for someone that&#39;s not getting to fish much.<br /><br />PS. for you cat fishermen, I caught a blue cat that weighed 12 lbs on a spinning rod with 10 lb test and a shaky head worm in about 18&#39; of water. It was the biggest cat fish I ever caught.