My fishing buddy and I made a trip off our beaten path to Mudge this morning, thanks to a video RichZ added to his blog that entertained my son while waiting for my father to get out of his doctors appt. yesterday.

Anyhow, we run into TommyTrebble as we're launching at half past o'dark thirty and got out about 6:30. Water has cooled all the way to 77/78. Decently cloudy with, at times, a strong south wind. I recall there being much more green biomass in the lake last time I was out there when we failed to find bullheads early in July. I'm guessing there is a mechanical weed remover to blame for it, all the loose weed suspended in the water by the launch made an absolute mess of the trailer and probably takes Waramaug off the menu for the next trip at least.

ANYHOO...fish tricked me into thinking they were shallow up above the weeds with a quick keeper as we were exiting the pads who hit a buzzbait. This did not jive with my expectation that they would be on the edge of the deepest water or in the shallows near by. Proved to be a fluke as I caught only one more on the jerkbait at the opposite end of the pond much later in the morning. Quickly caught a pair of slimers on the steep side of the weed point north of the launch and lost several appendages from our plastics trying to see if there were any bass to be had on the point (our results indicate no, there were not). So moving along we found a few scattered bass here and there but not until we were half way around did we finally catch several decent (2-3#) fish from the same general area on the mojo and dropshot rigs from in front of the outside weed edge in an area that descended quickly to 25' deep. That bite fizzled as the weather flip flopped from cloudy and calm to windy with breaks of sunshine around 8:45.

We probably should have called it at that point but we gave it another two and a half hours and came up with another half dozen 14" +/- sized fish on a variety of presentations and two more encounters with heavy feeling pickeral that made short work of my leaders. This was an additionally frustrating event as I accidentally left my tackle bag with my leader material and terminal tackle in the backyard next to where the covered boat had been.

Got some pictures of some satisfied smiles including one with Mr. Tommy (as my son now calls him) in the far distance marked in the corner as my son is proudly gripping his first "sink lure" spinning rod success. My son's reel failed and is waiting for its replacement, so he was learning how to use a spinning rod for the first time. The other pics were fish I hooked and handed off to him to fight & land. He adapted to the spinning reel quickly and most importantly he caught a nice fish on a dropshot...that and he never hooked me!