If you have read my posts in the past, you are probably thinking that I hit the wrong tab when I was prompted to select the targeted species. My posts are normally about pike but yesterday, the largemouth had diffrent plans for me.
We started on the south end of the main lake at CDA. Water temps were 70-73 degrees, down from the 77+ I was seeing on Tuesday. Water clarity was not bad but still a little murky in one of my favorite bays to fish for pike. I'm no aquatic vegetation expert, so I can't give you the exact name, but I have been doing battle with those dang stringy weeds alll year long. They have been cloging up a lot of the better cabbage beds, making it difficult to fish them for pike. Yesterday I noticed that a lot of them have started to go away in both the chain lakes and the main lake, allowing access to some of the more productive cabbage.
The fish were not cooperating in the main lake so we moved to the chains, where we found coffee colored water. We fished weeds and ledges with spinner baits, spoons, jerkbaits and of course, frogs for about an hour without a bite before we finally missed a couple of pike. We moved on to a more dense weedline and I hooked up on a couple of small largemouth with the soft plastic frog. A short time later I was tossing a white spinner bait around and got what I thought was going to be a nice pike. The bait landed in a gap between the weeds and a nice group of lillys. Just as the blade got turning it got slammed and I got a good hookset. The rod loaded up and the fight was on. The fish pulled like a truck, and my hopes were dashed when I saw it roll for the first time. It was a largemouth, not a pike. After a fun battle the fish weighed in at 6lbs 9 ozs. Don't get me wrong. I'm a pike guy but if you gotta catch bass when your pike fishing, they might as well be like this one. :) There was a bass tourney going on and we noticed one of the competing boats about 50 yards away from us, on the otherr side of the channel. I can only imagine their conversation as they saw us catch, photograph, and release that fish. We moved down the line and about ten minutes later I hooked into another nice bass. I thought it was about the same size judging by the fight but this one only weighed in at 3lbs 12ozs. I guess those tourney guys picked the wrong side of the channel to fish this time. The big one was a little odd. Great looking fish but had a much smaller mouth than you would normally see on a LMB of that size. Then again I'm not really an expert on bass of that size since this one was my personal best for large mouth. I ran in to a couple of friends at the boat launch that were in the tourney. They told me that fish would have made big fish for the tourney and brought home a check for $1000. I told him maybe they should try fishing for pike in their next bass tourney and they would bring home a better paycheck. :)
I did finally catch one small pike late in the day in that same lake and we missed more than our share of strikes. At one point Scott was fishing a frog and set the hook on a big fish. His rod doubled over and the fish instantly started peeling line off the reel, then in a flash it was gone. Explitive#+*% Explitive#+*% Explitive#+*% followed by an apology, came from the mouth of a guy that NEVER swears. Now that was funny! "Did you see that? Did you hear that drag? How did I not stick that fish?? We spent the rest of the day guessing and projecting how big that fish must have been. The longer we talked about it, the bigger we thought it was. I know where I'm going fishing next time. I'll have to let him know how big it really was in a few days. HAHA!
It was a slow day of pike fishing but a good time on the water sharing conversation with a friend I hadn't seen in quite a while. Thanks to Scott for coming along and thanks to those Largies for making the day more exciting.

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