I arrived at Enterprise at 5:45 Thursday morning with the intention of catching up on my Ribbit fishing. The Ribbit fishing, or rather catching, has been elusive for me lately and I dearly love it. The fish were not in a cooperative mood as there was only one serious bite early and a frog malfunction (wadded up) let about a 3 pounder escape. A deep water spot with stumps underwater yielded a couple of fish and another deep water place yielded another, all on a DT-6. In that spot the wind had swirled the duckweed into a solid mass out in the center of the lake and there was activity in it, as Hal calls it, nervous water. Missed another on a Ribbit and then one jumped all the way out of the water and came down on top of the bait. Caught that one. I kept on fooling around fishing here and there and figured out a slight pattern of fishing the first outside trees with shade with a DT-6.  That fizzled out and called for a change which came when the DT-6 got hung, I think on some rope, and then broke off when I tried to get it off with my “gitter”. The wind was howling straight down the lake and blew the boat into an underwater trot line where a hook snagged on the trolling motor. At this point I had caught 15 fish. I was a little mad and discombobulated. A DT-10 was on another rod so I just picked it up and made a cast toward the center of the lake, and surprisingly caught a fish. Another cast, another fish.  It was one on every cast for quite a while. Finally the trot line and the boat separated ways so I went out toward where the fish were and tied to a tree because of the wind. When the boat floated over the school I looked at the depth finder and it was covered with fish from 5 to 10 feet deep. The count went up to 54 and the bite slackened I thought, but in reality the school had just moved.  I searched down that stretch of bank for another school but found none, so I returned to the good spot and tied up. It was on again, this time with a DT-6. Finally, with the count up to 72 at 3:30 with two doubles for the day, they moved again and I could not locate them . All of the fish in the school were small, the largest was about a pound and a half, but I’m a sucker and will keep catching them when they are biting like that. Earlier I did catch the FOD at 4 and a couple of 3’s. Today was a good lesson in that when things are going to hell, success can be right around the corner if you just keep trying.

 This is one that looks as if it rubbed up against a poison ivy vine.