Misty morning leads to slower day on Round 7-25-17

[djkimmel]

I've decided to see all I can learn by fishing a small lake many times under many conditions watching for changes and behavior patterns hoping I can become a better angler. You can always improve - that part I'm very sure of!


So, I'm back at Round Lake on July 25, 2017 heading towards my recently good early morning buzzbait hot spot shortly before 6AM. I arrived at the little lake to find a moderate foggy mist hanging low over the lake to start the morning.

I didn't continue my usual ongoing social media posts during the day. I felt like I was a 'man on a mission' and went after it really hard!! Despite trying hard, I didn't accomplish it all.

I started on my morning hot spot in the light fog doing some buzzbait experiments. I started with the smaller 2K Jigs Titanium Freak Buzz buzzbait. I missed 2 quick - one hit almost at the boat (really nice bass from what I could see) and one just swam up behind trying to pull the buzzer down by the trailer. Tried a big black War Eagle through part of the spot - nothing.


Switched to a big, bright head-clanking Boogerman buzzbait I pulled out from my lure 'archives' and SPLOOSH! This bass smashed it hard!! That's better!!


About 10 minutes later This happened! No big surprise of course... the pike just love me this year...

The buzzbait bite seemed to peter out shortly after with no real good ones this time though I believe I missed another probable bass strike and mostly got away from several ornery dogfish. The gills and minnows were still feeding all over the surface!


It was near dead calm (much of the day), but not getting any more buzzbait bites even around little fish schools that looked to be getting attacked, I picked up the black chartreuse Power Worm and caught this small keeper right away under a school over a dying weed bed near the break.


Despite the great amount of visible activity all around it took almost 45 minutes to land another bass - off the side of the point under another nervous school of small fish. Had to let the worm sit a little longer to get popped by this nice bass! Lost some of my worm tail... Odd!

I fished this stretch hard for a while without getting another bite? Also odd...


After that I just had to believe there'd be some kind of topwater bite! The lake was alive at the surface everywhere! Switched to walking the dog with a less imposing lure - the white ghost Sammy... and caught this monster immediately! Boy! The tiny Round Lake bass just love the Sammy! Got blasted by several every time I broke it out! Better than nothing anyway...

So I headed for the fading hot spot #2 but again not much luck - the weeds are almost all gone.

But a lot of the back remaining weedline near the break was swarming with surface bait. I put on an Xtreme Bass Tackle 5" Slither X-worm on a slightly weighted wacky rig with a larger, wider bend hook.


Didn't find any big ones but I caught a good number of dinks to small keepers tossing it to flaring schools of minnows and small gills! Hooked and landed pretty much every strike so I'm thinking the other hooks are too small for my rig. (Still trying to figure out what the little ufo thing is in the lower right corner of this picture??)

While there, I had a FREAK MONSTER fish of unknown type just shred some bait only ~20 feet behind me outside the break!! What little I saw said giant bass but that could be fishing optimism effecting my already so-so eyesight...?? It might have been a huge dogfish. Didn't look or act like a pike... I fished very hard there for some time. Different lures. Different angles. Even came back again later... I'll be wondering what that fish was for some time. What a tease!?!

Eventually I made it further down the break. Where there's a nice turn in along the edge I left the surface feeding near the edge heading up shallow. There was very little cover left alive from multiple weed treatments. Mostly some thick weird clumps of grass-looking weed. Was somewhat surprised there were quite a few bass up there including some nice small keepers despite it being super bright, hot and calm in the early afternoon?!?


I started tossing the 90 size Whopper Plopper - something like a ghost minnow color - and they wanted it bad! Caught a bunch! It was less than 3 feet deep and they would jump all over it!! The few that missed I got some of them on follow up with the wacky rig.


Another small keeper from up shallow I caught on the follow up wacky rig. Just had to be a little patient letting it sink all the way down near the fishy spot and maybe let it lay helpless for half a minute to get the bass to commit! I had a really light weight on the X-worm so it still sank real slow and seductive!

Only problem with throwing the little Whopper Plopper up real shallow was the small pike and not-so-small dogfish also hanging out up there... They also really wanted my Whopper Plopper bad!! After a few close dogfish calls in a row - big, dark submarine attackers - I decided to head back to the break.

Unfortunately, the rest of my fishing day was unproductive. I did spend a fair amount of my afternoon checking GPS spots I marked from research that showed where deep weedbeds/clumps might be. I was thinking these might have escaped the weed killer and possibly harbor some untouched bass. Didn't pan out that way, at least with the spots I checked fairly thoroughly.

Well, you can't learn new things if you don't try things like this. Was my slowest day on Round this year. So far. Also had me thinking maybe this year I need to put a little more time into checking out the shallower water more often...