2017 Return to Lake Ponemah 04-18-2017

[djkimmel]

Well, Derek likes Lake Ponemah in the spring, that's for sure. So our first weekly weekday trip together was back to try once more to repeat our one past huge day of fishing on this small inland Michigan lake near Flint.

I can't remember every detail now though I know we didn't hammer the big female bass like we did on my first trip there a couple seasons ago. We started out, as usual, in the canals system looking for bass that wanted warmer water, trapped panfish and maybe some early spawning. It was a little early for that maybe but bass sometimes just get going at the first opportunity.

I started out like I often do on these early spring day, tossing and slow-rolling my lucky spinnerbait - the 1/2 oz bream-colored Kustom Kicker Deposit Spin Titanium!


After about 30 minutes of fishing a solid largemouth bass slammed the spinnerbait after I cast it over an isolated log on the shallow side of the canal! A good start anyways!


Barely 10 minutes later another solid largemouth bass came of an isolated piece of wood and hammered my 2K Jigs Deposit Spin Titanium spinnerbait!! Things were looking up! I thought...

Unfortunately, things slowed way down after that. We barely caught anything after that. A couple dinks and Derek caught a decent bass off the first bed we saw of the season. I didn't even see the bass on the bed, but Derek cast to it and got bit. We did see one more small bass on a bed. I don't remember if we caught it or not?

Even the normal few chunky pike were not eating much this day. I caught one and had another one try to get me that I luckily did not hook!! I actually saw one really nice ~3 pound bass shoot out of a weed clump in the middle of one canal but I could not turn this knowledge into bites as I spent some time before and after that casting to most of the scattered weed clumps - it was already really algae-coated in the shallower canals worse than last year this time!

For whatever reason, this same dock as last year we saw a bunch of panfish and a few really big bass laying under it!?! Last year it was loaded with panfish and several toads!! Not as many this year but what it is about that one dock out of so many, I don't know. Once again, even though I was prepared, I could not get any of them to bite!?! They just sunk out of sight not to return anytime soon.

After things appeared to be not happening really in the canals we went out into the main lake again and fished down along break with a middepth flat and scattered weed clumps along the edge and just down the first drop. This can be a great tactic on many lakes this time of the year as bass move up and in, but we went biteless there today! I did have one amazing fight that turned out to be someone's big wad of broken off braided line tangled with weeds. I was sure it bit me and even shook its 'head' a couple times... oh well.

Finally, we moved to a shallower weed flat near the canals and Derek caught another small keeper and a few dinks on a spinnerbait. I was trying something different for awhile at this time - I had on a slightly heavier tube jighead (regular tear drop head with an open hook) with an Xtreme Bass Tackle Formula G3 4" tube on it. I was snapping it out of thinner weeds and jerking it over the tops of thicker weeds, just letting it fall into the weeds only to snatch it free of them. I try this sometimes when I'm bored and need to move more to create some alertness...


So, I was pleasantly surprised when this nice chunker largemouth, only my 3rd keeper of the day, appeared out of nowhere to snatch this tube jig away from the tops of a weed clump!! I think I had a 3/8oz head in the tube so I was keeping it moving pretty fast and snapping it pretty aggressively to keep it from tangling completely in the weeds!!

And that was about the end of the day, time to go. Not real productive but a nice spring day on the water even though the wind, once again, blew fairly stiff as this spring is just all about...