The Early Bird Doesn't Get the Worm This Time of Year

Unlike those hazy, lazy, crazy days of summer, when the earlier you could get on the water, the better, this time of year is a whole different ballgame. I was on the water at 9 o'clock this morning, but if I hadn't gotten there until 1 p.m., and had been able to fish until about 4 p.m., it would have been hunky-dory.

As it was, though, I needed to get off the water at 2:30, or face the reality that I would have to put my boat away after dark, and that idea just didn't strike my fancy.

My lone fish for the day was this 1-3 that I caught about 2 o'clock on a chatterbait. However, I had missed two other strikes between 1 and 2 o'clock on the same bait. I had been fishing the chatterbait as a jig, and in both cases of those missed strikes, the fish picked up the bait and started swimming off with it. My problem the first time was that I simply thought I was moving the bait along a submerged log. It wasn't until I finally saw a telltale swirl in the water that I realized what really had been happening. In the second case, I just waited a tad too long to set the hook.

As I came alongside the catwalk this afternoon, I got into a conversation with a young kayaker who told me he has been fishing several mid- to late-afternoons in recent days and doing well on bass. He said you even can see the fish breaking on top. All you have to do is cast to the spot and be patient.

Now if you're looking for white perch, the rules are altogether different. I talked to a fella first thing this morning whom I had watched just making a wide circle in the vicinity of the point leading into the first major cove on the right, above the bridge. We swapped pleasantries as I moved past him to fish a ways inside the cove, and he told me he already had filled a cooler with some nice sized white perch, and I saw him catch several more as I passed him. I couldn't see what bait he was throwing, but it appeared to be some kind of silver colored artificial.

I later came across another fella fishing live bait under a bobber for white perch, and he told me he only had picked up about a half dozen or so.

The water color both above and below the West Neck Bridge today was pretty. I fished a variety of crankbaits, a wakebait, and the chatterbait, but only saw action on the latter. Reckon all I have to do now is to try and convince myself to fish a little later if I want to catch a few more fish. Maybe that'll happen; maybe it won't. Probably won't have to make that decision until maybe sometime next week, because the rest of this one--weather-wise--isn't looking too good to me.