New Lake on a Windy Day

[Garry2Rs]

On Sunday September the 5th we went to explore a "new to me" lake in the East Kawarthas near the town of Buckhorn. If you know where I mean, keep it to yourself.

 

The cast and crew included my neighbour Mike his 11 year old daughter Natalie...

 

 

If you have been around this board for any length of time, you will know that this little girl has been fishing with me for the last 5 years and is as good a fisher-person as any adult I know.

 

 

 

 

 

With tropical storm "Earl" passing to the east of us, the weather this week has been the craps! Everyday has had it's share of cloud, rain, wind, rain, sun, cloud, rain, wind etc, etc.

 

Let it be known that we aren't city kids, we're not sugar and won't melt. On the other-hand we live here, so we don't have to fish today or else!

 

In the interest of comfort and safety we've written off one day after another until Saturday night when we decided to chance it Sunday, come-what-may.

 

In truth, Sunday morning wasn't a great looking day. It was overcast with high winds...At the same time, we knew that our time was getting short. we had to ask ourselves; Do you want to gamble on Monday when school restarts on Tuesday?

 

I said it was blowing hard Sunday morning, and no boatman likes to battle a heavy wind, but as all we all know, on every lake there are degrees of rough water.

 

Even with white-caps on the main part of a smaller lakes, you can still fish, by running with the wind, on one side and hiding along the lee-shore, on the other side of the lake.

 

I have already said, this was our first time on this lake...So with no knowledge going into a new lake...What to do?

 

We motored around a bit and certainly we may have missed many things, but as far as we could tell, other than a few long shallow flats/points there seemed to be very little structure...Can you say "big oblong soup-bowl?"

 

How to start on any new lake?

That's easy...After all fish are fish aren't they?

 

These are my first three targets...Soft objects (cover) like weeds and hard objects (structure) like rocks/docks, then the first break-line between the shallow and deep water.

 

So, what happened?

 

We found a few fish on a very tough day.

 

If there are two sides to every story, on this one the downside is we hooked and lost a couple of very good LMBass...On the upside, we landed three SMBass that were over three pound each.

 

I'm not just guessing about the weights, we weighed them on a digital scale.

 

This one hit a chubby Japanese crank-bait...

 

 

This one bit a weightless pink Senko type worm, wacky rigged...

 

 

This one hit a brown Strike King Octagonal worm on a split-shot rig...

 

 

Three good fish on different techniques, but each technique related to the depth/cover/structure.

Garry2R's

[Bly]

Nicely done!