OCdockskipper

Of course, when I went out today, it was overcast all day. Visibility was real low, so I couldn't see any followers or wolf packs. I did toss the double fluke a bunch after hooking up using other baits, just in case the fish I caught was part of a school. 5 times it led to another bite, and one of those was a double. Don't know if I would have caught those fish with the original lures, but it is fun to have the possibility of a double with every cast. Thanks again for the suggestion.

I've used a Humminbird Fishin Buddy 120, a portable depth finder, for about 6 years & it works well on a small Pond Prowler. It is no longer made, but there are a few newer models with color screens for under $200. The advantage with these on a Kayak is no need for a battery, they run off of 6 AA batteries. I find I get 4 or 5 full days of fishing (8 hrs plus) before I need to replace the batteries, although rechargeable batteries could be used.

For little guys, they have amazingly strong jaws. If they latch on to a finger or thumb, it is a bear to pry them loose.

This story is about a bedding fish, but a little different than what you asked for. I was out the first Saturday of this past April, with the spawn coming to an end and only a few stragglers on beds. At mid-day, I was coming back to my dock when a gardener working 2 doors down started waving me over. As I pulled closer, he pointed towards the water & said in broken English "He has been watching me all morning". Stuck between the seawall & a paddleboat, I see a bed with a small male & large female locked on, facing the shoreline & the gardener. I back the boat off, make a couple of casts but neither fish moves, they just continue to focus on the human standing in front of them. I go ahead & dock my boat at my house & walk over to my neighbors house to get a better view. As I do, a carp swims by the bed, only to get chased off by the male. About that time, my neighbors' 4 grandchildren come down to the dock. I lifted each of them up, had them put on my sunglasses so each could see the bed & the fish. I always try to teach these kids about the fish, so I was explaining why the bass continued to stay so close to shore when they obviously saw the gardener standing nearby. As the gardener finished up & left, one of the kids asked if I could catch the bigger fish. I told them I could try, but it was more likely the smaller bass would bite and that it may take a long time for me to get the female to take a lure. I wanted to set their expectations to not get frustrated when it took a long time to get her to bite. With the gardener gone, I went back to my boat, pulled around to the bed and cast a 5" wacky senko past the bed, up onto the seawall. As I pulled it quietly into the water & to the edge of the bed, the female turned towards it. I hopped it once up into the bed and she swam over & dropped nose down. I didn't see her inhale, but my line jumped, so I set the hook. She immediately took off for deeper water & I landed her a few minutes later as the crowd of children roared their approval. So much for setting expectations, she bit on the first cast!! I brought her back to my dock to show the kids and they were amazed at the size of her head & mouth. She weighed 5 lbs, 4 oz, but had already dropped most of her eggs and probably would have been well over 6 lbs just a few weeks earlier. The kids got to see her swim away, although she didn't return to the nest immediately.

I prefer to throw those sized crankbaits using "The Fishing Machine", spooled with 4 lb test.

You are welcome, keep us updated as you figure them out.

Believe it or not, the young girl in that decoder ad grew up to be Bruce Jenner...

I always thought the drop in the handle was to accommodate reels like the Ambassador in your picture, which sit high. The drop in the handle made the center of the spool line up with the guides height wise. I remember in the late 70's, Diawa began to make their Millionaire reels more low profile so that the matching rods did not need that handle dip. The lower profile reels also made it easier to palm the reel.

So does BPS with their Bionic Blade series of rods, although they only offer it in a 5"6" and 6" medium rod. The reel seat doesn't drop down as far as on the older rods because modern casting reels sit lower, but it gives a similar feel. Probably because of my age, I still prefer pistol grips for quick, accurate casting to close targets.

I call these type of lakes "Development Lakes", since they are built to enhance a housing development. From the picture, yours seems to fit the profile: shallow, bowl shaped, very little or no emergent vegetation, cement borders, aerators to eliminate stagnation. Here are a few tips from my experience about where to fish: Often that concrete border has been undercut by catfish & carp rooting around wherever it ends in the water (sometimes out 5 or 10 feet out from the shore). That becomes home for baitfish and if the undercut is deep enough for the bass themselves. The bass will either hide out under it or swim around the perimeter looking to flush out baitfish. I see a couple of small docks and/or paddleboats on the water. Bass being bass, they will hide under them when the sun its out. The less used the dock/paddleboat, the better, unless it belongs to someone who feeds the wildlife. The bread thrown to ducks & geese attract bluegill, who attract the bass. If there are any semi-serious bass fishermen on the lake, trust me, there is a sunken Christmas tree or two some place. As far as lures techniques, my main recommendation would be to downsize & slow down. Be it topwater, crankbait, swimbait or jig, go with the smaller versions (Zara puppy instead of a full sized spook, 4" senko instead of 5", etc). There will be days when they won't chase moving lures, but will still eat a finesse jig or smaller worm all day long. Skip under the docks with a wacky rigged senko, that is something grandpa in the picture has never done. If you really want to keep it simple, just use a Z-Man TRD (Neg rig) all day long - these lakes are a perfect match to it. The fish will follow seasonal patterns, just in miniature and they kind of know the baitfish don't have many places to hide or run away to. Finally, if you have access to one of those paddleboats, use it. They really aren't too tough to fish from, will give access to the entire lake & you can even mount a Hummin'bird portable depthfinder on it to figure out where those sunken Christmas trees are.

Apparently the fall into the gorilla enclosure was worse than first thought...

Great suggestion, I'll rig one up for this weekend. Thanks

That can really mess up a day of fishing. You are walking down the bank, picking up fish here & there, when all of a sudden Herbert with the big under-bite shows up behind you and starts doing awkward somersaults. It turns off the fish & can be very distracting...

I would suggest that it is more lake dependent than region dependent. While nearby bodies of water may share some characteristics, it isn't unusual to have a good lake & poor lake within 20 miles of each other. That said, for my home lake, under 20 fish is a slower day and over 40 is a good day. During our six weeks of winter, cut those numbers in half. In comparison, when I was younger & fished a different lake almost exclusively, under 3 fish was a slow day and over 8 was a good day. Experience and better gear & techniques makeup part of that difference, but the body of water I think is the biggest variable.

I haven't fished Mission Viejo in 5 years, but George Coniglio (the guy who caught the 19-12 there in 2006) caught one that was 25.6" in length last spring. I haven't read where the overall population is now, it may still take a few years to return to anything like what it was. I typically fish from daybreak until mid afternoon. The fish caught in early morning usually don't have followers, they are either solo fish or their behavior is different (even if I catch multiple fish from an area only yards wide). The only times I can count on seeing up to a dozen or more followers is mid-day during this period of the post-spawn or a few weeks during the fall. The difference in the latter period is I am catching the fish away from the shore, over the tops of small weed beds in 5-7 feet of water. In that situation, the followers don't scatter, I can cast a jerkbait back to the same area and catch quite a few. It is only with this post-spawn, very shallow hunting that they follow & then scatter at the boat and I can't find them.

On my home lake, many of the bass are in a post spawn/not-yet-summertime pattern where they roam the shoreline in packs of 3 to 30 fish. I call them "wolf packs" because it appears their goal is hunting down the remaining fry from this years spawn. They seem to be like tuna, just constantly on the move, and not setting up residence anywhere. They will sometimes pull up under a dock, but I have never seen them stay put for more than a few minutes. Once one of them begins to go, the rest follow looking for the next set of fry to attack. This behavior lasts for about a month, until they settle into a more typical summertime pattern. I do okay catching those bass acting this way, either by seeing them before they see me and and casting in front of them or by skipping under docks. What I have never figured out to do is how to catch more than the first fish from these groups. No matter if it is the sighted (seen?) fish or one from under the docks, as I bring the hooked fish to the boat, there are multiple others around him, either following or trying to grab the lure from his mouth. They then scatter as the caught fish gets closer to the boat. They don't go back under the docks or resume their hunt, it is kind of like I am a cop breaking up a party and the bass take off like drunken teenagers to heaven knows where. The only thing I have ever tried occurred once as I was reeling in a 2 lb fish. About 2 feet below him was a fish 3 times his size. With my free hand, I grabbed a rod with a wacky rigged Senko, opened the bail & dropped it towards her face. As it descended towards her, a different smaller fish shot in & grabbed it. Now I've got 2 rods both hooked up, while the bigger fish is just watching the commotion of the 2 struggling bass. I kind of was hoping the big bass would eat one of the smaller hooked bass, but she just turned & swam away. Who knows, maybe they were her bodyguards. It wasn't as fun trying to land two fish at once as I thought it would be, so I gave up on that technique. Is there a way to manage or corral those wolf packs to keep them in place & catch multiple fish from the group or is "one & done" just the nature of the beast this time of the year?

That was what happened, his thrashing is what drove the hook down my nail. He was on one treble & I was on the other, but fortunately I was able to pin him on the deck of the boat pretty quick to get him to stop moving. These pictures were after the fact, I wasn't really interested in any photography while I was still attached to the fish.

It looks like you have inadvertently discovered an alternate to Botox. If you can patent stabbing women in the forehead as a medical procedure, you will be rich!!

That's the first thing I thought. I'm surprised someone didn't roll up & start flippin' a jig on it...

That is what I did as a teenager, yanked a River Runt out of a tree into my upper arm.

A couple of weeks ago, I hooked myself for only the second time ever (the first was over 35 years ago). I typically am pretty cautious when handling fish caught with lures featuring multiple treble hooks, but I must have been a little sleepy when the 4th cast of the morning resulted in a bass inhaling my Pop-R. I brought him to the boat, I reached down & lipped him and started to lift him. As I did, he shook and drove one of the trebles into my left thumb. I pinned him down to stop him from moving, unbuttoned him & released him (I could swear I heard him giggling as he hit the water). I looked at my thumb expecting to see a bloody mess, but instead found the treble had slid between my thumbnail and the cuticle, past the barb of the hook. No blood and as I suddenly realized, no pain. I removed the treble hook from the lure and attempted to manipulate the hook back out. Unfortunately, the nail bed prohibited me from the "hook pop" trick for removing hooks embedded in more meaty parts. I could turn the hook 90 degrees in either direction, so that the point was either under the nail bed or pressed up against the outside of the thumb. I figured the best bet was to create an exit hole & pop it back through. As I thought about it more, I guessed popping it back through would make it bleed and cause some pain where I thumb the spool on my baitcaster. It wasn't even 6 am yet and I didn't want to ruin a whole day of fishing, so I made an executive decision. I cut the treble so that about a 1/2" of the hook was exposed through the nail. With that done, I had complete mobility with my thumb, no pain and a way to still remove the hook later. I stayed out on the water until about 3 pm with no effect on my casting or reeling, although I did land the rest of my fish left handed. When I got home, I started to manipulate what was left of the hook to poke it through, but chickened out. I drove over to an urgent care center, they numbed the thumb up and backed the hook out without damaging the nail bed. Once the hook was out, you couldn't tell one was ever in there. No blood, no entry mark, it was as if nothing had ever happened. There was a little swelling that evening from the trauma of backing the hook out, but by morning it was as good as new. The positive was that it renewed my focus to pay attention when landing fish with multiple trebles hanging out of their mouth. I know some folks look at this as a reason to smash barbs or not use trebles, but once every 35 years is a pretty fair track record, especially considering it was completely avoidable and only happened due to a moment of carelessness. Any one else have an interesting self hooking story? Here is what it looked like after I cut it and continued to fish.

I use the P-Line 100% Fluorocarbon as leaders on my spinning gear, 8lb on most and 15lb on my skipping rod. I haven't had any problems with knot strength at either the lure or connecting to the mainline (I use both Palomar & improved clinch knots for the lures with a Crazy Alberto to tie to the main line). I do add a drop of superglue to the latter, but it passes through the guides with no issues and doesn't get beat up at all in a days fishing. Then again, I am probably in the minority because I also use Berkley Nanofil as a mainline, a line that a lot of people hate. The lakes I fish don't have much heavy cover, so I am able to sacrifice supposed durability for castability

It sounds as if your grandparents will be staying with someone. If so, take a shot in the dark & ask that person if he has any friends or acquaintances who live in Canyon Lake. It is a private, gated community, but maybe they have a contact who would be willing to let you & your grandfather visit and fish. Who knows, they may even be willing to lend you a boat for the day. It isn't that large of a lake that you need a full sized bass boat and the place is loaded with docks, so even those unfamiliar with the lake can get action by focusing on this cover.

I used to keep track mentally during the day, broken down by lure. On days when junk fishing was the best method it was a pain - as I'm casting I'm repeating in my head "4,3,12,9,1,1,3". I found it distracting and I felt like I had OCD. So, I stopped by Staples & bought a small, cheap dry erase board that has a magnet on the back. I keep it next to me, stuck on something metal & just make a slash for every fish caught like a jail inmate keeping track of his days in the clink. Only problem was a windy day, when it blew out of the boat. With rain, I just put it in a zip-lock bag. Once I get home, I transfer the numbers along with other pertinent info to an Excel spreadsheet. It is indeed neat to look back after a few years to compare what worked and results.