Conditions: Sunny skies, air temperatures upper 60's, water temperatures 70 degrees and gusty winds
With this being Fathers Day, my plan is to head to New Hampshire and spend a good portion of my day fishing a favorite lake. Arriving at the lake at sun up and having the whole lake to myself, where does one start with so many locations that can be fished. Not sure how the lake was going to fish because every where we have fished so far this spring, it has been fairly tough with the late winter affecting the lakes conditions. I am not one that likes to fish shorelines looking for bank runners and would rather fish deeper structure looking for a better quality fish. So starting on a fairly large flat where typically catch numbers of fish, fished all around and started noticing that this lake as well as others, is void of the weeds and I attibute that to the thick ice and lots of snow this past winter. Throughout the day I moved from deep water to shallow warm water to calm areas to wind blown shorelines. Fished a number of baits from small worms, jigs, crankbaits, carolina rigs and weightless plastics as well. Was picking up a small pickerel here and there and the lake was really going to make me work today. I finally connected on a good fish on the edge of a drop and didn't even feel the bite as there was just weight on the line. Caught this fish on a small plastic worm fished Texas style and was the only fish that was caught that I was fishing for. I spent a lot of time idling around the lake watching the electronics and was finding areas that there were schools of fish hanging, but with the high winds was fairly hard staying on the area and try to get them fired up into biting. I like catching fish just like the next guy, but my real enjoyment is just being on the water and trying to figure out what the fish are looking for and wanting.
It is going to be a fun few weeks coming up as I am being forced to take vacation and my son won't be at camp yet so we are going to be on a number of different lakes around Massachusetts and New Hampshire...until our next report...may your lines be TIGHT and FISH ON...
Conditions: Sunny skies, air temperature 80 degrees, water temperature 74 degrees and zero wind
Arrived at the lake early as I wanted to do some sonar mapping with the Lowrance Elite 7 HDI. This unti allows you to record sonar as you move around the lake and Lowrance has a online program that allows you to upload that data and they send you back a detailed contour lake map. The maps that are available on the East Coast are very generic and be doing this process, this allows us to see a lot mot things on a body of water that a good majority of anglers have no idea what is down there.
After doing this for a while, and still thinking that the fish may be spawning, I started the morning on a flat in a creek mouth that generally holds a number of fish this time of year. Fairly shallow water, from 2 - 8 feet of water and generally there are good clumps of weeds that the fish can hide in. After fishing around the area I am seeing that with the late winter that we had, The vegetation isn't close to where it should be at this time of year. In general, I am finding that consistently wherever we have fished this spring. Fishing this area produced nothing for bites so went back to mapping a different part of the lake. This area is a cove that has some very irregular contours with a few underwater humps as well. Started fishing on one of these humps and it is around 6 feet deep and has a good amount of vegetation on top of it. Didn't take long and connected on the first fish of the day, didn't even feel it bite as it was just there. Was fishing a lizard plastic bait Texas rigged with an 1/8oz weight. The fish gave a great fight and was a solid 2 pound largemouth but was long and thin. Basically continued doing the same thing all around the lake and just looking for different little things that maybe the fish were concentrated in. Made for a tough day of fishing as the heat and no wind really started taking a toll and we left the lake before noon.
We will probably be heading back to New Hampshire soon again and head for a lake that we fish very frequently...until our next report...may your line be TIGHT and FISH ON...
Conditions: Sunny skies, upper 60's air temperatures, mid 60's water temperatures and no wind
Since all of the local lakes were busy having tournaments going on we decided to hit the road and drive up to New Hampshire and fish a lake that we fished this past winter a couple of times. Apparently this lake is busy is the warmer months as we arrived at the landing fairly early and it was busy with anglers already. The landing is shallow so needed to take a bit of a walk into cool spring waters and it wasn't long and we had finally gotten the boat into the open water for the first time. I wanted to spend some time working with the Lowrance electronics and get a feel for the lake as we have a new lake mapping software, Insight Genesis, that allows you to create very detailed lake maps. We motored across the lake to where we wanted to try this winter and started fishing a rock flat searching for smallmouth bass. We fished the top and outside edges and just couldn't find any active fish. We moved to an close shoreline and watched to see if there were any spawning fish in the shallow sandy shore. We seen a few small bass cruising but never seen anything that looked to be spawning. We arrived at an underwater point and followed that out into the lake where we caught perch on crankbaits off the end of the point. Spent sometime doing the mapping and after getting home and uploading that and taking a look at it, I will definitely be doing a lot more of this mapping this summer. We moved over to the area that we fished a lot this past winter and still was unable to find any actively biting fish. We watched a few of the other anglers out there and you could tell that the bite was very tough and we didn't see anyone catching anything. Other than the few perch we caught the sun was getting very strong and without any suntan lotion, we needed to get off the lake and head out.
The local lakes should quiet down now with tournaments and we will be on one of them this coming weekend...until our next report...may your lines be TIGHT and...FISH ON...
