This morning after a quick limit of doves, I proceeded to the private hole to try my hand at the fish. My shooting this morning was much better than yesterday. Yesterday was so bad I almost quit. Pathetic and pitiful. I started fishing about 9:30. The period was supposed to start at 1:30 but I have found for some reason it seems to come an hour or two earlier here. It was not long before I was catching fish. The standard size in the private hole is 2 to 2 1/2 pounds. I started with a 5XD but quickly  had to change to a shakey head. The fish were biting but ever so softly.  After my deep spots ran out I changed to a Strike King KVD 1.5 square bill crankbait.  It was doing well until I hooked a jumping carp.  The fish was pulling drag and I was confident of getting the bait back but the fish hit the line with its tail and the line snapped. Many people have troubles with gar snipping their crankbaits off but those carp have taken more of mine than anything else. The closest thing to the 1.5 that I had was a Rapala  DT4 so I put it on.  I am really partial to Rapala crankbaits but compared to the 1.5 it was really hard to throw in the swirling wind. If you would cast into one of those gusts it would backlash every time with that flurocarbon line. It caught some fish but was hard to throw today. Look what I saw.

     and then     he left.

I don’t know if you can tell from the picture but that Gator was around 10 feet long judging by the length of my boat. Fishing slowed so I packed up at 2:00. The FOD was 4 1/2 with another 4 -5 and a 3 3/4.  I figured the best 5 were 18 pounds. I had no pen today so after catching 5 fish I would take my scissors and cut a small notch out of a piece of paper to keep an accurate count. When it really got slow I would cut an even smaller notch for each fish.  When I quit there were three big notches and three smaller ones for a total of 18 fish.