What a week this has been to say the least. My buddy Jeff flew in from Nova Scotia Sunday night for four days of fishing. He hit it right on the money this year with beautiful warm days and superb fishing. A big treat because other years he has shown up to cold days and cold water and few fish.
We headed for lake Jackson on day two of the trip and started off catching some nice fish on surface frogs fished along hydrilla edges. The fish seemed to come in bunches and we usually caught muliples when we got bit. The lake has changed a lot since I was here two years ago so we were relearning while we went. Most of the Kissimmee grass was gone as was the deeper line of reeds. My guess is that it was sprayed last year. As we worked around we saw a couple of boats run to the west side of the lake. Last trip the grass was so thick you couldn’t run it so that had obviously changed as well. When we were done with the area we were in we headed over for a look and sure enough the worst of the heavy hydrilla was gone. Very important to me because we were running a jet drive. It doesn’t mix well with grass.
Jeff stayed with the surface bait and I switched to a soft stick bait. We were both picking up a fish here and there as we moved between areas of pads and scattered clumps of Kissimmee grass. For some reason most of the fish were coming off the little clumps of grass. We were having a good day up to this point with around 30 decent largemouth to the boat when chaos happened. I pitched the stick bait in a gap between a pad bed and a patch of grass and the line twitched. I set the hook and the rod folded right over as this monster bass bolted from the cover. I told Jeff ” big fish” without knowing how big. She wrapped me up around some pad stalks and the only thing that saved me was the Power Pro. Jeff got a look at her as she came out and dove for the net and got her on the first pass. This is the second largest bass I have ever caught and she tipped the scales at 10.78lbs. A serious fish out of some tight cover on a Shimano spinning rod. I think the locals look at us a little funny because of the gear but it is what we are used to as Smallie guys and we don’t lose any fish because of it. I must admit in the second photo my arm is out a bit and it almost looked like someone ran it through photoshop but we didn’t.
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