What Bite There Was Lasted All Day

If I had set out this morning, looking only for quality fish, I would be a very disappointed angler right now. However, that wasn't the case. I simply was looking for a few tugs on the line, and I got that.

I started and stayed in West Neck all day, where, from 7 until about 10 o'clock, I worked mostly topwater baits. The only one that worked for me was a Bang-o-Lure, which yielded three dinks. I also had several missed blowups, as well as a few hookups in which the fish shook free before I could get them to the boat.

When the Bang-o-Lure seemed to have outlived its usefulness, I started changing back and forth between an SS Minnow and a Footloose. I couldn't muster the first strike with the SS Minnow, but the Footloose was a different story. I managed to boat six small bass with it--the biggest not weighing more than about a pound. As with the Bang-o-Lure, I had some missed strikes and fish that came loose en route to the boat while fishing the Footloose.

Given the cool temperatures and cloud cover that lasted most of the day, I really can't complain at all about the nine small bass that I caught today. It isn't often that you'll find me putting in an eight-hour day in August, but I did today and enjoyed every minute of it.

In most likelihood, I won't be making another trip until the middle of next week. If heart was all it took, I'd be spending a lot more time on the water, but both my arms have been messed up as the result of fishing all last winter, and I can only endure a limited amount of the pain that comes with every outing now. My hope is that, by laying off this coming winter, some of the discomfort will go away next year.

I want to close this report with a couple words about something I saw for the first time ever today. I just had rounded a bend in the creek, when the darndest commotion erupted right up against the shoreline. A pod of baitfish had meandered into the area, and all of a sudden, what appeared to be a school of bass spotted them and started having lunch. After several seconds, both the baitfish and the bass broke for open water, and I've never seen such a wake in the water before in my entire life. It kept shifting left, right and back again until finally disappearing in deeper water. I was so mesmerized by the whole display that I didn't even think about making a cast into the middle of it.