Got the skunk off my back yesterday! After fishing Sutton Lake Wednesday and getting skunked ( my buddy got two) I returned to pond fishing Thursday. They had just stocked a gazillion bluegills on Tuesday, so l figured I'd give it a try. Caught a lot of fish but a lot of them were dinky. Also, my old friend the Koi was back for a visit! He's about 2ft long and fat as butter.

Posting pics of my minor glory so closely following @king fisher and his DD beast has me feeling as if I were walking down main street in broad daylight while stark nekkid in zero degree temps. Shriveled and apologetic. Sorry everyone! Onward!

 

I think I can count on one hand the number of Crappie I've caught over the past few years at one of my local spots. I thought they were somewhat rare in this lake, but I was wrong. Some bass have already started bedding, the season closes on May 1st, and I was hopeful the bass bite would be on fire near the flats, but it wasn't.

 

My 1st bass came on the outside corner of a pad field in about 4 feet of water. He smashed my Shellcracker G2, then fought like crazy the whole way in, then every second while I was trying to get the pic. Then he shot off like a rocket when I released him. I've never seen a bed that deep around here before, so maybe he was guarding fry? All I know for sure is I haven't ever had a 3 pounder fight that hard and with no quit. It was like battling a decent smallmouth.

 

Next, a big crappie nailed the G2 within a few feet of where the bass hit it. Several more from the same general area hit the G2 and the Livingston Bullnose. This lent some weight to my theory that the bass was fry guarding. It's possible that the Crappie were there trying to pick them off. They were clustered up and keyed in on something, so who knows?

 

Anyway, I stopped counting the crappie after a while. They were everywhere I went, with some bigs mixed in. A turtle or a bird took a nice chunk out of one of them, but it seemed unfazed. Not what I was going for, but no complaints either. High winds and real feel temps of 28* tonight, which is a 40* swing overnight. One last bite at the apple on Saturday night before the 6 week shutdown for the spawn. It's Walleye time again.

 

 

Here are a few pics from a still cold (40ºs) Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts. Photos are from April 20 and 27.

 

 

A double caught on suspending jerkbaits.

 

 

This smallie took a vibrating blade bait assembled from components from www.barlowstackle.com. 

 

 

 

A decent (3.63 lb.) smallie caught on a blade bait.

 

 

It's not unusual to catch lake trout among the smallmouth early in the season. This plump one weighed 4.91 lbs. and put up a strong fight.

 

 

 

 

 

Three years is the making - Day 1 on the water with Big Fish Jeff ~

Tough sledding but we got a few ~ Back at it in the morning.

 

 

Fish Hard 

A-Jay

 

On 4/28/2021 at 11:23 PM, Bluebasser86 said:

When I'm in the kayak, I like to take pictures of them on the measuring board. I can sometimes get a decent selfie, but I'm not so worried about getting my ugly mug in the picture as I am getting a good shot of the fish on the board. 

I was going to mention this because I remember your video of the kayak tourney you posted a while ago. Seems like a hawg trough or a measuring device that the fish can sort of “lay in” would work.

Today was a good day of fishing. Started out with the "Choppo" test first thing, I posted that under the appropriate thread. Then I moved to the Carolina rig and never looked back. The red Roboworm with chartuese tail was the bait of the day two nice fish in just 15 mins. 

The last time I caught one this big, I finally bought a scale. And then proceeded to never bring it, sometimes purposely deciding to leave it in the truck, and end up catching very good fish. This time, I figured we would just run out for fun and it was extremely windy, right around noon anyway, so...no need for the scale. Again, I got another I wished I had a weight on. 

Measured 22.5 up against the kids rod. That's the best I can do. But I'll still start off the story to my cousins and friends telling them this was over 8 lb ?

Maybe this is another topic altogether, but once I started figuring out how to get them like this, I quit believing people when they would say there's no fish in a place or nothing big. They just haven't seen them. Not bad for a smaller size Michigan lake. 

 

22 minutes ago, Fishingintheweeds said:

The last time I caught one this big, I finally bought a scale. And then proceeded to never bring it, sometimes purposely deciding to leave it in the truck, and end up catching very good fish. This time, I figured we would just run out for fun and it was extremely windy, right around noon anyway, so...no need for the scale. Again, I got another I wished I had a weight on. 

Measured 22.5 up against the kids rod. That's the best I can do. But I'll still start off the story to my cousins and friends telling them this was over 8 lb ?

Maybe this is another topic altogether, but once I started figuring out how to get them like this, I quit believing people when they would say there's no fish in a place or nothing big. They just haven't seen them. Not bad for a smaller size Michigan lake. 

 

https://postimg.cc/dZR6XQB8/a355657e

https://postimg.cc/K1jVKLfw/b108fd2c
 

Maybe somebody can help me out with the posting? I read somewhere on here that uploading to this link would size the pics correctly and all I had to do was paste the link and the software would do the rest? 

 

Thanks!

11 minutes ago, Fishingintheweeds said:

Maybe somebody can help me out with the posting? I read somewhere on here that uploading to this link would size the pics correctly and all I had to do was paste the link and the software would do the rest? 

 

From my experience, it has to be a link to the image itself, instead of to a page containing the image:

 

The image page you posted:

https://postimg.cc/dZR6XQB8/a355657e

 

The image itself (obtained by clicking on the "share" link above the image on that page, copying the "Direct Link" text, and then pasting it into the post field here on this site) :

 

 

 

 

8 minutes ago, galyonj said:

 

From my experience, it has to be a link to the image itself, instead of to a page containing the image:

 

The image page you posted:

https://postimg.cc/dZR6XQB8/a355657e

 

The image itself (obtained by clicking on the "share" link above the image on that page, copying the "Direct Link" text, and then pasting it into the post field here on this site) :

 

 

 

 

I'm about to give this a shot right now but if I'm doing it wrong, how do we get the link from the image? If I do it right, maybe it will help someone else...I got it. Feel free to delete. 

 

Thanks!

On your image page, you wanna look for a button across the top that reads "Share". Click that, and the page will expand to show you different options for sharing the image.

 

The option you want is "Direct Link." It's highlighted in the screenshot below. Click the clipboard icon to the right of the link text, then press ctrl+v (or right click, then click "paste") to paste it into the post field here.

 

Day 2 on Lake Menderchuck ~ Big Fish Jeff  & I had to battle some fairly insane conditions again ~ But still managed to put a few in the net . . . .

Fish Hard 

A-Jay

A month ago while watching Jason Christie win the Bassmaster Sabine River event, I remembered I had previously bought a few of the Booyah Covert Spinnerbait he was using, but hadn't tried them yet.

 

I got to remedy that this morning with a gold double-colorado model -- yup, it's good:

 

Some recents, didn't grab pics of all the bigs.  Swim jig and pitching jig, I guess that's all I need....

 

 

Was planning to get out today after 4 ( I may still ) but a thunderstorm was coming . So I stayed home. Walked down to the dock , caught a little bream, hooked him on my bait rod , tossed it out 10 feet, and about 20 seconds later this was the result...

Day 3 was a numbers day for Big Fish Jeff ~ 

Fish Hard 

A-Jay

 

I got out after a thunderstorm for a couple hours and worked hard to get 7 , 6 of them on the rage tail cut-r. Got the biggest one on a bitters bc buzzn gator in june bug blue...

The pounding winds we had on Friday, and huge temp drop, chilled one of my favorite holes 5-7 degrees in the shallow spawning flats. Rooted plants have barely started to take hold yet, and the pad fields here are way behind, so there's not much to hold the heat at this spot. The bedding bass I'd spotted just a few days earlier had all pulled off into who knows where, and it was tough sledding for quite a while.

 

It looked like another night of Crappie-palooza and a basslet dinkfest, but we stuck with it and caught a wave of Greenies coming in for breakfast two hours before dawn. My buddy hooked a solid 5.1 slugger on a G2 at the end of a monster bomb cast. My brother tossed an Eco Pro tungsten swing head jig tipped with a Krakin' Craw directly into the mouth of a 3.4 at the corner of a pad line. Finally, a hard charging 3.1 ate my Beast Coast Miyagi.

 

After that, and several short strikes later on the Miyagi, I downsized swimmers and my rod to a MH. With no takers I tied the Miyagi with a 6/0 Beast hook back on again. I knew this was risky with this rod, but I was dead tired at this point and unwilling to trudge back to the bank to swap rods to my Heavy. Sure enough I got blasted. The MH bent in half. The fish ran straight at me, laughed, then shook off at a rod's length out. It's all good though. Each of us beat the skunk and hooked up on our last bass trip until the season opens again in 6 weeks. Good times.

 

I caught this bass around the low-mid 2 pounder fishing my Olive Green Shadow Rap from a dock! Not bad for being stuck on one dock and in cool water temperatures imho!

OH BOY. Felt like summer. With air temps in the 80s for the weekend (back in the 50s now), my brother and I hit the river and caught a decent bag of 12.5 lbs worth of smallmouth. My brother caught his new PB smallie for 2-7, and I added two 3-0s, and two 2-0s. All were around beds. Cool looking fish as well. We did leave some beds- only targeted the bigger fish to give the smaller ones a break.

6 hours ago, JWall14 said:

OH BOY. Felt like summer. With air temps in the 80s for the weekend (back in the 50s now), my brother and I hit the river and caught a decent bag of 12.5 lbs worth of smallmouth. My brother caught his new PB smallie for 2-7, and I added two 3-0s, and two 2-0s. All were around beds. Cool looking fish as well. We did leave some beds- only targeted the bigger fish to give the smaller ones a break.

I agree that those are some cool looking fish. Very nice patterns on them.

Wife and daughter wanted to go after work tonight so we squeezed in an hour. I only caught two including this one (4.53)