Upper Crooked Lake Sunday 4/30/06

[djkimmel]

More time today (although I don't usually try to get out real early this time of year). I head over to Upper Crooked Lake to see how the bass are doing.

Most of the lake it 57 to 59 plus. Very breezy with strong gusts, hard to see with that adn the overcast. (Oh and it starts raining just a few miles before I get to the lake - rains most of the time out there.)

I head into my favorite backwater and catch a solid keeper on a black stealth buzzbait tossed at some new pad. The one other boat back here leaves. I'm alone.

I keep tossing the buzzbait while I'm real shallow. I have the two most awesome leaping crashing strikes back-to-back on the lure from a hole in the weeds. The creature only barely bumps the lure, but what a crashing attack. I'm thinking... another musky or large pike, right where I left off yesterday!

Two strikes and I'm out though. I work my way around and catch a couple by tossing a wacky-rigged Xworms to any movement I see. I usually clean up this time of year on Bomber Shallow As, but no go today.

I get way in the back to where I can't go much further without getting stuck and I start tossing the buzzbait again. Within the next 20 minutes I land 6 quality fat bass on the buzzbait. Turns out bass are way in the back real shallow spawning on lilly pad roots (the bottom is muck for a long ways down).

I key more in on the buzzbait and keep picking up bass on it. About half our solid keeper. Not finding the bigger females though. I keep switching back to the crankbait and a deeper Square A to toss out into the deeper weed flat where the bigger bass usually hide. I catch one dink.

Every time I switch to the buzzbait for a few minutes, I catch a bass. Many of them just swim up and pull the lure under - not too many hard smashes.

I decide to try another bay that usually holds some feeding schools. I thought the water was down and it is. The bay seems almost a foot shallower than even last year. I move fast tossing various colored shallow cranks. I see something scare minnows and pop one about keeper size on the crankbait, but then nothing more.

Finally I move to the edge of real shallow mucky pads and find that bass are still in them despite the shallowness. I'm tossing the buzzbait again and all around the back ends, I get bit every few minutes. So I keep it up. No big ones. Not even much size, but most are 10 to 13 inches.

Some of the smaller ones do crash the buzzbait fairly hard. After catching 6 or 7 more, I decide to hit a sand bar in the main lake on the way in to the ramp. I toss crankbiats and spinnerbaits. A very big pike slams into my white-on-white spinnerbait... trying to continiue where I left off the day before.

I manage not to hook the toothy brute (7 or 8 pounds from the look of it). I call it a day on that note after catching a respectable number of solid keeper bass.

ANOTHER GREAT DAY on the water!