The Little Spot Truck Stop

First official work Monday of 2021! So that means wake up early, reply to all the work emails from last year and of course grind out a quick 1 hour trip. You never know how many potential trip days there may be in one year, so I want to keep ahead of the pace for the historical one year challenge of 182.5 fishing trips. So I headed out just after lunch with Audible and Navionics on the phone and stereo. What, you don’t listen to audiobooks while trolling?

Just a hop skip and a short book chapter across the main lake is a tiny island with lots of current going around it. It looks fishy and we’ve marked there but never caught so of course it’s the first place I go. Nothing like almost to get a fisherman to do the same thing twice.

I started scanning on the southeast end of the tiny spot of dirt surrounded by water, and had only gone a few hundred feet or so when I started marking ’em’. The depth was variable deepest around 65 or so, shallowest probably 45 feet deep. The fish were marking all over the place 30 to 40 feet all different sized marks.

So out goes the trolling motor, down goes some live trout for drumroll….my first lost fish of the day! This time I really did wait for the drag to scream. No time to scream about lost fish though, the dash sonar unit kept beeping like a telegram. The message was clear, with great haste sir please hook another bait.

So back down goes the line, only to quickly get stuck, the wind was blowing and gusting and I was brave going below 30 feet into potential trees. I had to get another bait down quickly with all the marks on the sonar, plus I was only going to fish for an hour no matter what happened. My quick choice was to fish first and tie hooks later. I broke out one of Mrs. Fisherman’s Five’s ancient reels, pretty sure the same kind they used on the Oregon trail. You know the round ones where nobody knows which knob is the drag and which knob is the other one that isn’t drag but acts like it? That kind.

Before I could finish tying on a new leader and hook I was able to hook up with a baby spotted bass. So our purple marker in Navionics now becomes a green to denote fish caught and gets a name. This locations name is the “Little Spot Truck Stop”. Because its location off the main lake seems like a little truck stop for fish to grab a bite.

I think with moving around and the wind I was marking a mix of spots and stripers but who knows? Solo fishing trips for such a short time are harder to manage on the fly. Deciding where to go, how long to stay. While I think I had the boat where the bait was, the wind made holding where I wanted too difficult. I think that was just a long winded way to say I need to improve at where and how to fish in windy condition.

I feel like I should have caught more, I’m sure the fish all felt differently.