how much was it to hire him lol if i cant get my first bass within a week ima have to resort to somethin like that

Thanks for posting the report Jim and thanks for the great day out on the water! I had another trip on Saturday, and we only managed to boat two smallies, plus there was a tournament going on and most if not all of those guys were fishing the beds that still held fish. Definitely hitting postspawn conditions now, and it's getting real tough. fishin masta, please check out www.watkinsbassfishing.com and give me a shout if you have any questions. Just a little more info to tack onto Jim's report, many of these fish have already spawned and moved out to deeper water again to recover. Everywhere you find beds you'll find fry schools swimming around right now and most likely a smallie hoarding them in. One fish that Jim got actually had two partially eaten fry halfway in his throat, so they aren't just corraling them, they are eating them too! Water temp is between 65-70 degrees now consistently.

davidwat1, I was out there on Saturday and noticed all the small fish around the beds. Do you mean to say they are baby smallies? They seemed rather big to be smallie babies (or what I would think their size would be). I thought they were salmon smolt or something.

hookemdanno I saw your report nice job out there! I can't say with 100% confidence that the fry are smallies, but I really think they are. The salmon smolt started showing up about a month or so ago, and in my experience at least on Sammamish, salmon smolt get schooled up in much larger numbers, and they are also more erratic, where bunches of them are jumping out of the water all over the place, and they also typically have a really bright silver flash to them. The schools of fry I saw shallow were all pretty consistent in terms of the number of fish swimming in them, they almost always had a smallie cruising around in their vicinity, and they lacked that really brilliant flash of silver. I will agree with you that they are a bit long for brand new smallie fry, but bass fry do grow really fast too once they first hatch so if a batch hatched a few weeks ago it's possible that's what these are from. I did also see on a few occasions where a smallie that appeared to be close to them, would make a quick flash sideways, and I thought when I saw it that he was actually eating the fry, but too hard to see to that level of detail to know for sure. After seeing the two fry in that one fish's mouth it at least confirmed my theory that they were eating them as well as swimming around them, but those two were too far digested to make a positive ID. :)