I only had an hour to spare today, so instead of going to the private hole, I went to one nearby that is shallower and the wind happened to be blowing into the end where the landing is. I had a tip from Frank that there might be some fish there. The wind blowing into that end usually means the shad will be there too and thus the bass.  I had a rod that belonged to my children when they were small and a reel that Hal found under the trestle  at Arkabutla when the water went down. He cleaned it up, put some line on it and gave it to me. The rod is a little limber but is not too bad. I had a 1/4 oz Booyah limetruse colored spinnerbait with a willowleaf blade tied on. One hit on the second cast.  I ended up catching 11 bass and 2 stripes in an hour, standing in one spot. One of the bass was eyeballed at 3 pounds and another was eyeballed at 2 – 13, there were also two on the other end of the spectrum that were microscopic almost. Never the less a good hour spent.

It was foggy when I arrived at the private hole this morning.  This is what it looked like.

Pretty spooky looking and was very quiet.  I went in a different direction than usual to start and started with a 4 inch swimbait with a hook exposed jig head. It was dipped in some orange Spike It with a strong garlic scent. It turned into a firetail swimbait.  Since it was so dark and was sort of cool, I didn’t expect any action right off the bat but I was wrong. I caught two quickly in one spot. It was a place where the wind had a slow vortex going around the hole and there were a lot of leaves floating in it. Not many more until about noon when things began to pick up some what.  Going through that drought I had resorted to a shakey head worm but only had two worms that were quickly torn. I took a small plastic with a club tail and trimmed the body so the hook would come out and put it on the shakey head. I dipped the tail in some chartreuse Spike It to enhance both the color and the smell. When you pulled it, the tail would swim and the fish seemed to like it.

This is the picture from the last post but with a regular jig head . The only problem was I only had one with me. A sack full at home but only one in the boat. When will I learn? After that was gone I pulled out another new bait, Spiked It with chartreuse and put it on the shakey head.

This photo is from the last post too. I think most were caught on this bait and a shakey head.  The bites were all very timid.  Once I wanted to fish a spot directly across the hole, so instead of fishing the bank around, I just turned the trolling motor on and headed straight across. Instead of doing nothing I threw a XRD-8-S out the back of the boat and trolled it across. Made it halfway across when the rod loaded up and this was on the end of the line.

The fish was in 30 feet of water suspended, I guess, right out in the middle.  There were 16 bass for the day with a FOD of 2-15 and 3 grinners.

This morning at the first good light I went to the private hole with the intention of first rigging up an old depth finder on my boat that I keep there and then going fishing.  The sonar is a Humminbird TCR 4 ID.  I wanted to fix it so when I finished fishing I could take the whole thing, wires and all, off of the boat. The purpose of removing the whole thing was so the rodents would not eat the wires.  After a brief vehicle swapping with  Gayden I was off fishing and soon caught the first fish of the new year. It bit a Rapala DTF 7, a flat sided diving and suspending bait. It’s supposed to go to 7 feet but in reality goes to over 10.  The fish was suspended out in the middle in 26 feet of water.

Keeping my eye on the prize of learning some new things,  I kept on with the suspending baits and caught a couple more including this one with an X Rap XRD 8 S.  X Rap Deep 8 Suspending.

I tried out some new baits too that I don’t even know the name of. No bites on either one or the bream swimbait from the last post.

Both baits were fished on the same jig head but the bite was so slow and light today it was hard to have any luck on anything that moved much at all. One of these was leech looking thing and the other was a small swimbait . The bream swimbait from the last post looked good but you had to move it fast to make it swim right and fast was not the ticket today.  Some were caught on the jerkbaits but most of the fish today were caught with a worm. The bites were light and hard to detect.  I ended up with a smooth 20 fish and a FOD of 3 – 0.  Of the new baits, the one I’m most excited about is a 3/4 size Ribbit frog  in an outstanding color. If I had acquired these before Christmas I believe I would have strung them and put them on the Christmas tree.

The first picture is the top and the other is the bottom.