At least you are together.  My son used to be my best fishing buddy.  Now he's 25 and thinks I'm an idiot,  so soak up the good relationship.  It means a bunch to your pops, trust me.

Caught another good 5+ this morning. I almost decided not to go out— I’m glad I did. 

** on a side note: does anyone know why some of the iPhone pics get rotated 90 degrees when posting? 

7 hours ago, Guitarfish said:

At least you are together.  My son used to be my best fishing buddy.  Now he's 25 and thinks I'm an idiot,  so soak up the good relationship.  It means a bunch to your pops, trust me.

sorry to hear that man. i hope things turn around for you guys.

3 hours ago, stk44 said:

Caught another good 5+ this morning. I almost decided not to go out— I’m glad I did. 

** on a side note: does anyone know why some of the iPhone pics get rotated 90 degrees when posting? 

ok, i don’t know of any better ways but here is what i do with my pics. on your iphone, go to your individual fish picture and click the EDIT feature. when it comes up hit the rotate feature (mine is like a box with a curved arrow). rotate the pic 180 degrees (regardless of where it ends up). hit the DONE feature. then go back and do the same thing again, this time rotating the pic to the desired positioning. then hit DONE. that’s it.

7 hours ago, Guitarfish said:

At least you are together.  My son used to be my best fishing buddy.  Now he's 25 and thinks I'm an idiot,  so soak up the good relationship.  It means a bunch to your pops, trust me.

Hopefully things start turning back the other direction soon. I didn't really get back into fishing regularly until I reached my 30's and once I bought my own boat we started fishing together at least 1-2x/month going on 15 years now. Many things conveniently aligned to allow for that frequency to happen, but I think a lot of guys get drawn back to that common bond for the outdoors and fishing when they hit that 4th decade. I'm hoping your guys' father-son journey is a similar one. 

Had big plans today of fishing the Saginaw bay out of bay city.  All that got shot to crap after fishing for an hour due to family drama with my sister.  So I spent more time driving than fishing.  The island at the mouth of the Saginaw river is right next to the shipping channel. The islands is maybe 2 miles from the mouth.   Drops off to 10-14 feet almost 360 degrees around the island.  It drops off fast in maybe 5 feet.  It is a man made island. it is where they put the dredge spoils after dredging the channel for the freighters so that they can get in and out of the river . 

 

No bass in my limited time.  I’m preatty sure a big pike bit me off and lost a war eagle spinner right off the bat.  Luckily I had a duplicate.  Lost a big cat after he rolled him self up in my line.  I could literally feel him un wrapping himself once he was under the boat.  Than boated this decent channel cat.  Spinner bait was a war eagle 1/2 oz golden blades and shaft with chartreuse and white tipped skirt.  Than I got the phone call and had a 20 minute boat ride to launch than hour drive home.

 

havn’t caught crap on spinner baits all year.  Last year I threw them on my  black maxx with mono.  So this time I broke the black maxx combo after an all summer hiatus. It still has 10 lbs big game spooled-up on it and had 3 hits on the spinner bait in an hour. 

 

One of my college buddies that now lives in Memphis comes into town two weekends a year to fish for smallies. He was set to arrive Friday just short of the hurricane remnants, luckily the weatherman was wrong as usual. TVA was also preparing for big rain by cutting the current back to minimum flows, which bodes well for shallow water smallies. 

 

Friday afternoon we had good low water conditions scheduled until about 8 pm. I tried cast netting some minnows but only got one small sucker. A dink smallmouth ate that right away, looking like this journey is artifical baits the rest of the way. Not 5 minutes after we ran out of bait, my buddy boats a 19" smallie on a keitech in some rapids, pressure is off now. We proceed to catch tons and tons of small fish all the way down the river with a few decent ones mixed in. we hit a spot on the way back to the ramp and got a walleye and spotted bass and got to see a barge going upriver in the dark. Fun evening with no rain 

 

We woke up to some strong winds and drizzle Saturday so we took our time getting to the water. It had almost quit completely until we launched in these conditions.....

Didn't even need rain gear as it's pretty hot and just thick drizzle, it cleared off before we stopped driving the boat. Today we were more determined to get some live bait since we had way more time. We got one minnow with the cast net but decided to try a siene. We got some.crawdads and several helgrammites (grampus as the old timers call them). We anchored up in some shoals and the helgrammites started getting bit immediately. I think we caught 6 catfish, 2 drum, 3 mooneye, and several smallmouth rather quickly, the best of which being 18.5 inches. We did one more bait run and ran out very quickly, back to artifical for the afternoon. We ended up getting a couple decent 16-17" fish this way and I got a 20" dragging a tube in 3-4 feet of water. 

 

 

Sunday brought a beautiful sunrise..... Only problem was someone backing up on the bridge to take a picture of it......

 

We didn't catch anything but dinks, saw some huge fish blowing up shad. My buddy had to drive back to Memphis at noon so we headed back to the takeout. On our way back, some friends we had seen on the water sent us this pic of a 21" monster 

After taking the boat out, I Had some more buddies wanting to fish the afternoon. Quick lunch break and I launch again, TVA realized the rain was gone and started pumping. We tried a different tributary that was still low and my friend got a nice 18" with his new baitcaster he was so proud of swimming a jig in the rapids. We still had all my nets in the boat, found some shad and caught a few more dinks. What a weekend! 

 

 

23 hours ago, Guitarfish said:

At least you are together.  My son used to be my best fishing buddy.  Now he's 25 and thinks I'm an idiot,  so soak up the good relationship.  It means a bunch to your pops, trust me.

This seems to be very common...almost all my buddies have had this with their dad at some point. I did from the age of 17 to about mid 20s...thought he was a jerk and a dumba#$. One day I woke up and realized I was wrong and didn't know what I was talking about. Since then we have had a great relationship.

Took my brothernlaw fishing where I go at and he caught his PB. Maybe 5lbs? But anyways, he was really happy. Caught it on a chatterbait. 

 

 

On 8/28/2020 at 9:58 AM, J._Bricker said:

 As I was heading to the ramp at 0530 I noticed the outside temperature display on the trucks rear view mirror was 54 degrees. This was a drop in temperature from yesterday morning’s 63 degrees at the same time. I was hoping this might get the fish thinking fall was not too far off and start putting on the feed bag. 
 Dropping the boat in at the last half of an outgoing tide, water temp was at 75 degrees and change. What became a blue sky thanks to firefighters battling the regional fires for almost two weeks I wasn’t disappointed by the fishing. I was able to hookup with a drag pulling 5.2lb crankbait fish to start the morning off right.
 I then switched tactics and started to punch the mats. On one pitch, an area the size of a garbage can lid rose up and a good fish came out of the vegetation. I watched as the fish crashed down my bait and then my rod loaded up. I set the hook and felt the fish for a brief moment before reeling in a trashed bait covered in grass. My second best of the day, a 4.8lb punch fish, also that came from the same area a little while later. 

Very nice beast!  Where did you launch from?

23 minutes ago, FrankN209 said:

Took my brothernlaw fishing where I go at and he caught his PB. Maybe 5lbs? But anyways, he was really happy. Caught it on a chatterbait. 

 

 

Hard to tell with the angle of the camera but from what I see id say all of 5...I'm thinking maybe pushing 6. It's a beauty for sure.

1 hour ago, DeeGee68 said:

Very nice beast!  Where did you launch from?

Thank you sir, and launched outta Bethel Island @DeeGee68

Tried a new lake today. It’s only about 40 min up the highway from my place, but when you have literally hundreds of lakes within a half hour of you, it takes a while to hit them all. Anyway, it was a pretty heavy cold front today, with stiff winds and bluebird sky’s all day, but we still managed a few decent ones. Crushed a frog in shallow pads. Definitely gonna have to try this lake again under better conditions. 

Got off work and cut the grass, my fiancé says she needs to go outside for a while, like maybe a boat ride. Bingo! Only had about an hour but got a small largemouth and a rock bass with speed worm. There’s some thick vegetation near my house so I threw the ribbit around (thanks for the inspiration @scaleface). Some massive fish blows it up pretty quickly and I missed it, fairly certain I set the hook way too early. My fiancé says it’s going to rain and we have to leave so I convinced her to let me try one more bank across the channel. Blam! A 20”+ smallmouth smashed the ribbit and the fight was on. Luckily I had 65 lb braid and I could see 3/0 round bend hook right in the cheek. He jumped what seemed like a hundred times but never came off. It’s crazy because the fish that i missed blew up the frog twice as hard 

 

Went out Sunday to a nuke cooling lake.  It's got the biggest fish in a 100 mile radius but it's always a tough place to do well.  Even worse being August.  Water temp with the plant going was up to 94.5 degrees.  I launched before dawn and fished five hours.  I saw at least 40 other bass boats on the water and I only saw ONE guy catch a bass and it wasn't a biggun'.  I stuck with it and caught only one but she was one oz. shy of four pounds.  This lake is hard to fish but the bass are all just healthy and beautiful.  It was truly a blessing to get this one.  On a side note, I really need to find someone else to hold my fish for pics.  I'm 6'5 and I can palm a basketball off the dribble.  All the fish look small when my hands are holding them.  LOL

 

I had the DTs yesterday due to a massive skunking, so I needed to lip something, anything, to comfort myself.

 

 

Shore fishing at a new spot today. Believe it or not this is my first fish on a chatterbait! Never understood the hype for that bait but I used it in place of a spinnerbait. Was using a slow, straight retrieve with some pumps mixed in. Also one of the very few green bass I caught this year. 
 

 

@Bluegillslayer congrats on your new PB! Stay on em!

 I headed out this morning with smoke haze obscuring the sunrise. The “delta breeze” creating some wind chop as it worked against the now outgoing tide. With 72 degree water, I wondered what affect this might have today’s bite. Fortunately, I wasn’t disappointed!

 I was able to tie into a 6.0lb drag pulling senko fish. As I was hanging over the gunnel hand lining her up, I thought one of these days I outta put the net in the boat. Not to mention I was glad one of my Covid projects was installing Carbontex drag washers on all my reels. A little while later, I connected with a 5.8lb and a 4.4lb crankbait fish. I was punching the primrose mats off and on throughout my junk fishing morning, my best punch fish were a round 3.0lbs like this one. 

 Considering how tough the bite can be this time of year, I was pleasantly surprised with mornings success...
 

Bunch of dinks this morning, this one felt like a monster compared to most of the rest.

 

Stopped one short of 1650 on the year

Waited out the rain for 45 minutes I. My truck. Launched from center street and headed up stream. Couple from today.  Both on a chigger craw from Tittabawassee River

The late summer dinkfest has finally kicked in!