Recounting a 100-fish morning filled with bass, bream

My neighbor, Tom Ray, and I fished a private lake last week from our kayaks. It’s one of the lakes where I hunt ducks.  It’s always full of aquatic vegetation, which makes it great for ducks. Ducks don’t come to just any pond. It’s not only water that attracts them.  It’s food – like hydrilla, milfoil, pond weed, coontail and many other aquatic grasses. But not only is this aquatic grass good for ducks, it’s an awesome habitat for fish – especially for largemouth bass.

We discovered that the lake was full of bass while duck hunting. When you see a sunfish fly out of the water amidst a huge swirl near your decoys, you don’t have to be a prophet to know that was a bass feeding. So we began to occasionally make a kayak bass fishing trip. We have never caught less that 50 bass in a 3-4 hour trip. Plus it is full of bluegill sunfish.

Last week was no exception. My first cast with a white popper on my light fly rod produced a good strike. I set the hook and soon had bass number one in the kayak. As always, I released him. The first hour was none-stop bass catching. Tom was across the lake and I was sure he was experiencing the same world-class fishing.

But I was also missing lots of fish. I could tell that they were big bluegill sunfish (bream in the south). But they wouldn’t eat my big bass popper. I wanted some bream to eat so I switched to a little bream popper called Miss Prissy. That did the trick. I quickly landed about 15 bream. I kept 8 to eat. Tom saved one big bluegill for me that actually hit his tiny Torpedo surface lure. Nine nice bream would be all my wife, Beth, and I could eat for supper.

I switched back to the bass popper and continued to hook bass. My bottom was tired of the kayak seat so I paddled to the truck, put my bream on ice, and returned to the lake with a bait cast rig armed with a plastic worm.

 Wow! Those bass loved the soft plastic worm even better that the popper. When we loaded the kayaks at 11 a.m., I had caught 43 bass and the 15 bream. Tom had caught over 30 bass and probably 25 bream on a tiny dropper fly below his popper. Most of his bass were caught on the surface Tiny Torpedo and plastic worms. That was over a 100-fish morning.

There are very few large bass in the lake. The average fish is less than two pounds.  We have caught a few four pounders on past trips but they are scarce. Problem?  Too many bass in the lake.  The lake owner said to start throwing them out on the bank to die. That’s what needs to be done but I just can’t do it. Maybe we will start keeping a legal limit from now on.

Driving home I began to reflect on some of my greatest bass days. One was a big fish day. Big bass don’t bite every day. But that day I was on a private lake in January and it was cold. I fished a large white spinner bait and got a total of five strikes. I hooked all five - 11pounds, 10 pounds, 8 pounds, a 5 pounder and a 3. It was my largest stringer of bass ever to this day. Probably always will be.

Another trip stood out in my memory. It was my 50th birthday. To celebrate, local bass fisherman, Bobby Whiteside, and I went fishing.  Imagine that!  

The bite that day was unbelievable on that private lake. It didn’t matter what lure we used. They liked them all. We caught 100 bass on plastic worms. It got so ridiculous that we decided to have a contest. Each of us would choose the ugliest worm in the box. The other guy had to fish that worm until he caught a fish. Then he would give me an ugly worm and I had to use it until I caught a bass. No worm was too ugly. They bit them all. Some took longer to entice a bite but they eventually all worked.

What a day that was! That doesn’t happen every day.  But it’s the memory of those kinds of days that keeps hope in our hearts.