The Gangs All Here

I'm going to start with the end of the day. On my way out of the parking lot, I ran across a guy wadering up to do some fly fishing. He said he was at the lake last Friday afternoon when the DFW dumped four (yes, that's 4) truckloads of fish into the lake from the launch ramp. This was after I left and if you read the post from last Friday you know we (Me, Yuki, Marisa, Jim, and Chuck) all limited and then some. He said that he fished with black Wooly Buggers and brought twenty to hand, but most were small (in the 9 inch range).

Roll back the clock to this morning. I left the house at the usual 0715 and made the mistake of stopping at the Shell in San Andreas for gas, a pit stop (the real reason for the stop), and coffee. The coffee was terrible and I won't make that mistake again.

Got to the lake at 0845 and immediately started landing fish. After the first one on the stringer, I noticed the fish were feeding on something on the surface so I went up to the truck and got my fly rod. Tried a paralyzer first and a Thin Mint, but what ever it was, it was so small and I couldn't see it, so I couldn't try and match whatever they were eating. The other thing I noticed is that I'm REALLY out of practice. I could barely get the Thin Mint out ten feet and that's with a tungsten bead. Disgusted with myself, I gave that up and went back to bait dunking.

I also started donating to the log. You remember the log from last Friday's post. The one I said was going to start eating tackle. Today it got one rig and two fish managed to use it to return to the lake for another day.      

The Log

It's now completely underwater and just far enough from shore that your only option is to break your line if you become snagged.

With both rods out of the water (you dasn't leave them alone for more than a minute or two or you had a fish on. Twice I had fish on both rods at the same time) I walked up to the truck for a couple of PB&J's on fresh baked bread, just in time for Jim and Chuck to drive up. With Jim you always get Bear the dog and if you're any kind of nice person, you share what ever you have to eat with Bear. As with the cinnamon swirl coffee cake last Friday, if it had been up to bear I wouldn't have gotten any of the PB&J either. 

Back down at the shore it was fish after fish again. Now as you can see in the picture below, Chuck has this fishing thing down. Fishing in the lap of luxury. He does have a fish on.

Chuck

Around 10:00 Yuki and Marisa showed up and the catching continued. At 11:00 having filled put five on the stringer, I carried up most of my gear and got my bucket to put the fish in. When I got back to the shore, my stringer was gone. I had tied it to a rock, but it was nowhere to be found.

I wasn't so upset that the fish were gone, but that I paid about twenty bucks for that stringer and it was gone.

After everybody got past their ha-ha's, Yuki came walking around the point with my stringer and fish. That's OK though, I'm a big boy and can take a joke, but I'm also a Leo and Leo's don't get mad, they get even. You know how the old saying goes "Paybacks are a bitch". Oh, it won't happen right away, but it will happen. It could be next week, next month, or it could be next year.

I ended up with five on the stringer, nine released, and two released via the log. I have no doubt that the rest of the gang will take limits home today.  

I really need to work on casting my fly rod.