onthewater102
Member
Registered: 04/14/05
Posts: 1649
Loc: Kent, CT
Well, O'Bass spilled my beans. I've been getting some after-hours fishing in while dodging thunderstorms on a quiet lake in the NW corner. In 4 trips so far I've only had my fishing partner and the mosquitos to keep me company. The quality of the bites have been better when there's been some moonlight on the water, but the bite has been pretty steady from 10pm on.
We hit it especially well last Friday night. I was showing our friend from NC around, apologizing to him the whole time that he'd wasted vacation time to fish CT of all places. Well, that was unnecessary as the bite was on pretty much from the moment we hit the water. Pretty standard mix of night-time baits, spinnerbaits, chatterbaits & top-water. I'll tip my hat to this nifty prop-frog bait from Lunkerhunt:
Gives you the stop & go presentation and the prop plop sound of a whopper plopper without having 2 treble hooks on the loose in the dark. It accounted for the best fish on the night, a 5lb 6oz that slurped it down without a splash just around dusk. Of course I don't have a 2nd picture of it where I don't look like a doofus or have a very identifiable shoreline behind me.
Shortly after 9pm we found a few decent fish before dark set in.
From those fish until about 11 we caught quite a few in the 1.5# - 2.5# range, but it seemed like my partner was losing the better fish against the side of the boat failing to lift them in the dark. After letting this happen 3 or 4 times he denied wanting the net on what appeared to be a particularly strong fish. Chastising him (jokingly) for having been wrong each time to that point I netted it anyway. This was at the end of his line:
That went 4lbs 1oz on the scale (on a prior trip the week before they were hitting the topwater baits, but alas not this time.) So from there on we netted everything, which was just as well because of the 15 or so fish we caught after that point I only recall 2 that were under 3lbs (one being my cat). We took pictures of anything over 4, with one fatty that missed the mark by an ounce, so here's the remainder of the fish porn:
That last fish was the last of anything over 4lbs, just before 1am, we continued to catch 3's right up to the last cast shortly after 1:30. Unfortunately, O'Bass had him up at the as$-crack of dawn fishing the salt, so he'd been up for 20hrs+ at that point and we were due to meet O' for breakfast in 5.5 hours before the two of them took off for Champlain. With a boat ride back to the truck and an effort to carry the boat out I knew we had an hour from the point we left to the point we'd be back to the house, so, against every bit of better judgement and using every ounce of will power I had (catching back to back 3.5's on my last 2 casts) we left them still biting and called it.
I didn't feel so bad about missing out on Champlain after that night.
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