This afternoon Mickey and I met at the wharf at 3:00 and set sail onto Ferguson with it standing at 23.7 feet.  We started at the rockpile and on one of the first few casts I came back with a 4 – 2 on a Poe’s crankbait. Fish were breaking all around but there were no more in the size range of the first one. There were stripes in the middle of the lake and black bass all around the sides.  We caught some of the schooling bass that were up to 2 1/2 pounds but generally the schooling fish were frustrating. Here one minute and gone the next.  A Yozuri did pretty well with the schoolers.  When we went to our other spot, the bass  were clowning down there too. We chased fish all afternoon catching them on Yozuris, DT – 6s, DT – 10s, and even topwaters. Mickey caught two at one time on a crazy shad.  After he got them in the boat, the back hook of his bait came off. It was a bait that he had  purchased in the 70s.

We went back and forth on the same stretch for most of the rest of the afternoon. You never could figure when you were going to catch one because they  were all over the map.  Some shallow and some deep. When they would chase shad in the shallow water, I would ease the boat closer and get Mickey to throw the crazy shad. I just enjoyed watching him work his magic with it.  We ended up with 52 bass and a few stripes. Some of the stripes were giants and the rest were babies. There were none in the middle. It’s going on in Lake Ferguson.

Hal burned them up one day recently when he caught 120 in one sitting from 7 to 12.  Then he went home and got Stef and came back later that afternoon where she caught 13 and he caught EDIT: 16 making his total for the day 136 . The FOD was 3 3/4.  They caught them wading on Beartail Creek somewhere close to Coldwater. The first 40 were caught on a spinnerbait, almost on every cast. The next day he found some running water in a beaver pond and caught another 30 in another spot. If it were not for catch and release, he’d have to buy another freezer and he would be still be cleaning fish today.

The wind was out of the North and the sky was clear this morning as Jackson and I set out on Lake Chicot. We headed back to the same old places where we have been catching fish but they were not very fired up about feeding. We caught a few small ones on the usual suspects, Yozuri, Red Eye Shad, and various small shallow running crankbaits.  When we had exhausted all of our spots, we went over to the deep side and ran the side scan depthfinder to see if there was any structure out from the docks and close to the drop off. The side scan is pretty hard to see in the boat with the glare from the sun so I saved some on the SD card to bring home and look at on the computer screen. Here are two from the deep side.

If you click on them they will enlarge and you can better see what I am describing.  In the first one you can see two docks with a few fish around them and scattered fish in between. Stretching from the top to bottom on the left-center of the screen you can see a line where the drop off starts. There also  appears to be something in the upper right between the docks with three fish on it. The second one shows a dock that we passed with something  that was almost under the boat when we passed over. It has small fish on the left end and one big one on the right end. Then from the dock to toward the top of the screen is all kind of underwater structure with a few fish on it.  After we did the depthfinder work we returned to our spots to try again. At two it was nothing but at the third there were some fish. The next photo is of part of that spot. The depth says 1.1 but it’s more like 3.8. I could adjust the sensitivity and make it read right but then the fish would not show up. That happens only in water under 5 feet.

You can see a cypress tree on the bottom left that is cutting off the sound and making what looks like a shadow. On the right side are submerged small willows and weeds. They make an underwater point right behind the tree. Also behind the tree are some fish that I would bet are bass and there are several more toward the top of the screen. We caught some fish here with a tailspinner and a worm and  ended up with 40 bass total.

This afternoon on Ferguson, Mickey and I found the bass in two main places.  We caught the fish in spurts, two or three at a time. It was obvious that the school was moving around but since they were not hitting on top you did not know where it was.  When you happened to throw where it was, the fish bit with gusto. We caught 12 from 4:00 to 7:30, with no really big fish. We got word of some guys catching a boatload in the last few days however. They caught the schools hitting on top and threw a 200 Bandit into them. We caught ours today on a DT-6 of course.

John Eddleman took his grandson and his son on a fishing trip to his private spot and had a great fishing trip. Here is his grandson.

The grandson had a pretty good coach and was pretty good at catching too.

It was their annual fishing trip and fish fry. I think they caught enough for the whole crowd.

Looks like everybody had fun.

Jackson and I convened at the ramp on Lake Chicot at 5;45 this morning with ideas of a repeat of our 103 trip. He fished there yesterday with his son and caught 15, so we were worried about the two good spots Jackson had found being worn out. Sure enough, we only caught one or two in both spots.  We decided to go look for the squirrel log where he had seen the bass hit at the squirrel as it ran down the log for the bank.  As we arrived the bass surfaced chasing shad. We caught about 15 there before the fish quit/moved (you never know which). Keeping on down that bank we ran into some more activity where we caught 18. Most of the fish to this point were caught on a small rattletrap and a Little John shallow crankbait. Leaving there we returned to the log where we didn’t catch any or many, I can’t remember which. After that we went to the bridge over the lake and some docks. The docks held a few fish which would bite a worm, or in Jackson’s case a creature bait.  As we returned to try our new spots again we saw schooling activity about 100 yards away, so the correct choice above must have been “moved”.  I had on a Scrounger jig head with a Calin grub on behind.  They loved the scrounger, and seemed to hang on to it better than anything else I had fished with all day.  We ended the day with 64 bass, mostly small and a FOD of 3 pounds. Another fun day on Lake Chicot.

I went to the private hole this morning for a couple of hours. Richard invited me to Beaverdam to fish but I had to decline his nice invitation due to my construction/flood repair project. I figured I could fish for a couple of hours and then go to the house since I’d already be up there. There was one problem.  I don’t wake up too well and after remembering to think about getting to battery, I still forgot it until I was on the other side of town. It cost 30 minutes of fishing time to go back to get it. When I finally got to the hole and ran the stumptail out from under the boat rack on the bank, I went straight across to a deep point with new laydowns.  Nobody home, but from there I saw some bass chasing shad.  First I threw the clown, a clown colored spook jr. which has a shiny gold body and a shiny red head. Two immediately nailed it but escaped so the substitute was sent in. The sub being a 1/4 ounce red eye shad that immediately started catching. It caught until a tighteye did one of those energy filled shakes right at the boat and snapped my 8 pound test. Now what? There was a “found” bait that looked like a Yozuri imitation that I have caught a lot of fish on in the box so it was put on.  I had used it so much the eye that you hook to had loosened. Some J B Weld had been applied to hold it straight but I couldn’t get it to run straight. It’s going to the scrap heap. Another “found” bait came out. Again it was one that was good at catching fish, a Rebel Deep Crank R which is no longer in production. It too had been repaired because of a leak that caused it to fill with water. Superglue held for a trip but then it leaked again, so out came the J B Weld again. It wouldn’t run straight either. Junk pile bound. Finally I put on one of the “poem” Rattletraps from Craig T. and it was catching too. By then an hour had gone by and the bite was slacking. That battery 30 minutes weighed heavily, since I had caught 9 in the first hour. I ended up with 12 and a FOD of  3 – 9. My DT-6 stash is down to two and the rest of the small crank bait box has taken a pretty good hit. Time for a trip to Bass Pro or maybe an internet order.

My fishing has been so bad lately I got Jackson to “guide” me on Lake Chicot this morning. He’s been burning them up there for the last month. We went straight to one of his good spots and started catching fish, Jackson with a small shallow running Lucky Craft bait first and then a Red Eye Shad.  I started with a Yozuri and they liked it a lot.  I was coming to the boat with a cast and the Yozuri was rattling up a storm when a silver carp ran from the Yozuri and jumped into my lap and then into the boat.  Those things are quick because it slimed my pants and pooped on them as it passed by and of course it made a mess in the bottom of the boat. Scared me to death. A gar grabbed my Yozuri and powered through a fence and broke me off. Next on was a rattletrap but it missed a good many pretty quickly (EDIT: It happened to be the only one in my box with doubtful hooks. The hooks on the other rattletraps are sharp.)  I then put on a Red Eye Shad. The hooks on the Red Eye are superb and will catch anything that comes near. At one time almost every one I caught was hooked on the outside of its mouth.

We had some mishaps today that turned out to be good in the end. In one I had put on a spoon to use to fish through some weeds.  There was a small snarl of line on the reel that I tried to throw out. The line buzzed on the reel and broke taking some line and a Rex spoon with it, and leaving a terrific backlash. I stuck my rod into the water and finally came up with the line, pulled it in and got my bait back.  EDIT:  Believe it or not, I was able to pick the backlash out in about 20 minutes yesterday afternoon without the use of a pocket knife.

Jackson beat that feat. He made a cast and his line snapped with a Red Eye on and a long piece of line attached.  An hour and a half  later I hung the line and we pulled in the bait which had two bass on it.

No biggies but two never the less. There were also three other instances today where I caught two at a time and one where Jackson had on two and got them to the boat where one escaped. By 1:15 we had caught 103 bass. The FOD of course was the lap carp. What is so amazing is the bass have been in the same shallow places for a month. What fun !

I went to Lake Ferguson this afternoon armed with an SD card inserted into my sidescan depthfinder.  Even though the new toy was on board I started fishing seriously. I only caught one in that hour, fooled with the depthfinder a little and continued to fish. In two more hours I caught two more, so three in all. When I got home I downloaded the screenshots from the card to my computer, surprisingly without too much trouble. The first two scans are of a sunken wooden barge. Note the water temperature.

If you click on the picture you can enlarge them and begin to see some bait fish around the end of the barge. In the first picture you can see a little bush on the point just before the barge, some rocks around the point, and a few fish around the edge of the point. The fish show up as white oblong spots.

The third one was taken in the chute where you can see many more fish, some even leaving sound shadows on the bottom where they block off the sound that makes the image. There are a good many bait balls or schools of shad. One is directly under the boat and five more are off to the side. The depthfinder was set to look to the right side of the boat because the transducer is on that side and a better picture is obtained because there is no motor interference. The black portion on the left side of the picture is the distance from the bottom of the boat to the bottom of the lake.  Mine is a first generation model and does not have the resolution of some of the newer ones but I think it’s still pretty neat.

Fishing has taken a backseat to an important project I have going on at present.  The 2011 flood has messed up my fishing from it’s start and I have a way to go until fishing gets back to a more regular schedule. I am raising my house on the river three feet, demolishing the bottom floor and repairing the flood damage in the top floor. This is how the house looked before the flood.

The flood floated off the rear stairs, almost the side stairs, reached the ceiling of the downstairs, got a foot deep upstairs, and floated the garage into the trees destroying it.  The downstairs has been demolished, the house has been raised and the supporting piers are the next step. Here is where we are now.

After the raising is complete, and after repair is started, my fishing may pick up some, especially if the weather cools off.  The temperatures have been brutal. Even though I have been doing no actual work, I have lost enough weight to where my pants are trying to fall off.  I’m going to have to take lessons from those guys you see on the street walking and having to hold their pants up with one hand.