Fish Catching Travel

Catch a couple of new baits today!

After a long run of bay fishing it was time to check in on Coleto and the bass fishing.  It also gave me a chance to fish with Voe before he is out of here and back to Vegas.  He finally got the work done on his house and it finally listed and will be showing Monday.  With the amount of work they did on that place I predict a sale in less than a month.  But I digress.

The lake appears to be rising slowly, and the water color varies between somewhat clear to murky the farther up lake you go.  The weather started off with a little cloud cover and light wind, perfect bass fishing weather.  But alas, Coleto is still really inconsistent for me and though we caught a few, 11 to be exact, I still have not found a real pattern.  So we spent the day looking and trying different stuff.

Voe with the first fish of the morning.

We started off with buzzbait in main lake coves.  Voe caught the one above right off the bat, and then in spite of my repeated throws off and on all day it turned out to be the only one on a buzzbait.  That has been kind of frustrating to me as it and spinnnerbait are just not working like falls past.  So we headed way up lake to fish wood with plastics, and though the fish were not tight to the cover, they will still close to it.

A nice 3 1/2 on plastics.

We kept hunting and pecking here and there.  It seemed one of us would get a bite, and then the other one would to.  Though we did not catch a bunch, the ones we did were fat and sassy.  We specifically took a picture of the one below to show you how fat they are.  I would suspect the one below had some eggs.  Hard as it is to believe pre-spawn is right around the corner.

Look at the gut on that thing.

Besides plastics, Voe caught one on a scrounger head with a shellcracker plastic on it and one on a vibrating jig with a craw trailer.  Mine all came on plastics.  It was really interesting how when they hit they would start swimming with it, and I mean fast and far.  We missed several that swam so far it was hard to get the slack out for a good hook set.  We did have a couple of close encounters with what looked to be nice big fish.  Voe had one boil a slow rolled spinnerbait as he took it out of the water, and I had another one boil the heck out of a topwater.  For the day was both caught basically the same amount of fish, and most were ok keepers.

For me though it has been a struggle.  The fishing on Coleto has been tough and I have done a poor job of correcting that.  Insanity has often been described as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.  That is how I have fished the lake the last month, trying to hit a big bite before a front.  Expecting the fish to do what I want, when I say they should.  Then when they do not I keep doing it over and over.  I will have to think that one over for awhile.  Suffice to say we had an ok day and it is always nice to fish with Voe.

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And while we are talking about fishing, when we went to Coleto to clean fish the other day there were a couple of guys cleaning fish, one guy with a bunch of crappies.  He said he got his in 14 – 23 feet of water on jigs.  They were good crappie, and I have been seeing lots at the lake the last few weeks.  So if you like crappie now is a good time and it will only get better the next month.  Additionally the guy fishes Sommerville as his regular fishing hole and said the bass fishing has been fantastic, not to mention the crappie fishing.  Shoedog and I really suck at that lakes so I guess it is time to give it another go.

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One of the great things about the outdoors is how random stuff can be.  Shoedog has been hard after a good buck this fall, spending some serious time in the blind.  So of course what happens when he fishes with me a couple of days?

   A nice solid buck.

This guy walked in front of the blind once in the morning and then in the afternoon at perfect shooting time.  Funny how stuff like that works.  It will be even funnier to see how it goes for me.  I hope to hunt Thanksgiving day and try to kill a fat doe for the freezer.  It has been about 20 years since I shot a deer, but I sure do like venison and tators smothered in mushroom soup, one of my favorite meals.

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It is Saturday morning and as I write this it is time to get excited about another Arkansas Razorback football game.  Somehow my Hogs have won 4 in a row, with 2 over SEC west opponents, on the road.  And here we are, second in the West behind Alabama after basically whipping LSU’s booty.  It was similar last year with the Hogs getting tougher as time went on, and that sure is the case right now.  But even if it goes our way the rest of the year we will still finish second.  As I tell all the delusional A&M fans, to win the west it still comes down to beating both LSU and Alabama in the same year.  No easy task.

The wind is howling as the cold front rolls in.  We will see the 30’s tonite with our first real front of the year.  My in-laws up in the middle of Iowa are getting a real taste of it as the rest of the Midwest is.  Looks like they got about a foot of snow and it is 19 degrees as I write this.  It sure looks pretty, but you can have the snow.  So what is next I do not know, but I will be back on the trout in a couple of days, depending on the wind.  I appreciate you all reading this stuff, so keep stopping in and thanks for reading my stuff.

Good Luck and Tight Lines