But neither Mickey or I have not forgotten how to cast. We Started fishing at the Private Hole about 9:30 in a pretty good wind. Once before early in the year I had a hard time in the private hole after it had been extremely cold so I was worried about a skunk. The water temperature started out at 44 and ended up at 48 degrees. It took Mickey about 5 minutes to run the skunk away and I followed up quickly with the 4.58 pound FOD. All on a DT-6.

Today was a five star day on my fishing app with the notation “good all day”. It was accurate. We started with a DT-6 but also tried a worm and a Booyah. At one point I also put on a swimbait and caught one on it even though most of the bites were rather light. We caught fish on all of the above. Mickey was the first to pull out the Booyah and quickly caught 3. That made me rattle around in my tackle bag and come up with one too. Our offshore spots were not productive for some reason. Most of the fish were caught around some sort of cover so the Booyah was a good choice. The wind was howling all day making handling the boat a pain. It also caused more than one backlash of the serious kind. The wind also causes the fish to move in the Private Hole. They usually go to the bank the wind is blowing to. It locates the fish in other ways, by blowing the bait fish along and the bass locate in ways to get a meal by ambushing them as they come by. For some reason the fish would start to just nip at the spinner bait. That was when we would break out the shaky head worms. The bites with them were on the light side also. A lot of the bites ran toward the boat making setting the hook a little more difficult. All in all it was a great day. We caught a smooth 30 fish.

It has been two months since I last went fishing, probably a post retirement record. The dry stretch was caused by deer hunting until about the middle of December. Then my children came home for Christmas and I didn’t want to miss a minute of them being home. Now, for the last two weeks, it’s been the cold weather. There has only been one day in 2018 that was decent to go but I had a meeting and then some other things came up to take up the rest of the day. I’m fighting off the cabin fever and when the weather gets conducive for fishing I’m going to make up for lost time. Right now I’m sitting the fireplace with a good blaze going.