West Crooked Lake 5/19/2016

[djkimmel]

With a little bit of East Crooked Lake at the end, Derek and I took our almost weekly trip to West Crooked Lake on Thursday, May 19th, 2016. We were thinking we would find some bass on beds but to shorten that part of the story quickly if they were on beds we couldn't see them or tell.

I started out catching my first keeper bass on the inside edge of what weedline there was in the corner of the lake we usually see some bass. I tossed out a Kustom Kicker Jigs wacky jighead with a stickworm and let it slowly sink to the bottom. Lift up the the following bass had hold of it!


My first small keeper bass caught on the wacky rig tossed near the inside weedline. A short time later I caught another keeper on the wacky rig doing the same thing but it was pretty slow for me... and my patience.


A little while later we were working down a shallow drop in mixed weeds, mostly curly cabbage, when a really nice bass came after my little Husky Jerk jerkbait. I missed the fish but it gave me the idea what to do the rest of the day and it seemed like the best technique. I was casting out over the weed strip a little later when this nice bass followed the jerkbait to the boat. I stopped the jerkbait pretty close and the bass ate it! Nice!

The only thing I had a major problem with was the pike! As usual they were prowling the same weeds on the hunt!

We saw a number of cruising bass in a few key places and they would sometimes slam the jerkbait or a few other presentations but often they followed the lure nipping at it more than eating it so I changed things up a little later.


It didn't work a lot better on the bass going to a small, deeper diving Lucky Craft jerkbait though it truly worked good on the pike! They were eating it to the point I still can't believe I didn't lose it. I did manage a few bass like this one from East Crooked Lake.

Derek started doing better tossing soft plastics when we moved to East Crooked Lake out past the dropoff. I mostly kept catching pike like I always do on the outside weedline on East Crooked Lake. I did see one pretty big bass but was unable to get it to bite before it spied me.

We didn't light the world on fire but we found a few bass willing to bite and made the best of some kine of maybe spawning funk the bass were in considering how many half-hearted followers we saw that nipped at various lures.