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!

Was nice meeting you & son today, he's an awesome fishing partner to have. Almost couldn't believe it when I saw the d/s rod in his hand.

You two did a lot better than me, couldn't believe how tough it was. I called it quits at 12:45, everyone else was gone by the time I got back to the launch. Only ended up with 2 largemouth in hand (lost another on the d/s from a leap) -- one on the d/s, the other on a white SB on the Northern end. I even used the Frog in the pads in the Eastern cove, had one blow-up, that was it. Also 4 pickerel, 1 crappie, and 1 sunfish, that was my day. Had several bites in 10 fow, but by that time weather was starting to beat me down. Super humid when I was loading back up, glad I left when I did, so much for the thunderstorms.

Hope to run into you2 some time over there at W, Wendy & I are planning to go there this Fall a lot.

Always nice to meet up with people from the site on the water!


He definitely doesn't fish the whole time, usually I try to get a few small keepers in the livewell to entertain him (and my daughter if she's with us) but with the state imposing the pointless protected slot limit there we could only have put one of the fish we caught in the tank and I don't like holding big fish if I don't have a good reason to.

Today he spent an equal amount of time playing with the lures as he did fishing, but he's got the spinning rod casting down pretty well at point, so the time he applied to fishing seemed to be well spent.

We try to stick to waters where we have better numbers regardless of their size(and therefore more for him to do) than what we managed today and last week on Waramaug, but the temptation of going after bigger fish under the cloud cover has just been too tempting to resist these last two weekends.

Sounds like a pretty solid day to me

Nice job in getting your son comfortable with things. Hopefully, a life long fishing partner is in the works.