Lake Tohopekaliga February 17, 2011 Fishing Log

While I wait for SIr to upload his pictures, I will start with my fishing log.

On the morning of February17, 2011, we fished Lake Tohopekaliga (Lake Toho) for 4 hours prior to boarding our cruise to the Bahamas.

The morning started out extremely foggy with limited visibility.  The temperatures were around 15 degrees Celsius with no wind.  The week before, the temperatures had dropped due to a cold front, resulting in difficult fishing.

We started out fishing a weedbedand emergent grass in about 8 ft of water.  While our guide set Spam up with golden shiners under floats, I decided to start out with artificials.

I started out fishing a Gambler Flappin Shad in clear/white with blue fleck, retrieved at a fast enough speed for the tail to churn on the surface like a buzzbait.  I was hoping that the fish would be active enough, to chase topwaters, but no luck.  Our guide stated that the fish were not very active at the moment.  I switched to a Spro Aruku Shad rattling lipless crankbait in golden shiner, and fan casted to no avail. 

After about 45 minutes, Spam had one on, but could not set the hook due to weak hooksets (likely the result of soft wrists San Francisco boy).  Interestingly, you could tell when a fish was around the bait due to the action of the fish struggling against the floater.  It was rather captivating.  But, by that evidence, you could see that the bass were not aggressive, and were almost toying with their prey.  They would agitate the shiners for some time before taking the bait.  This would be an indicator of the fish' attitude.  After Spam's second missed fish, I got an opportunity to use the live bait and it paid off with this fish.

which was a very nice crappie by Canadian standards, but nothing compared to the 4 lber our guide told us about!  The shiners we were using were 6-8 inches long.  When you think about the size of the bait, it was amazing that a crappie took that bait!
Shortly thereafter, I got another on live bait.  But after a few more missed by Spam, we decided to move.  Our guide took us to a spot that ended up being occupied by another guide.  It was over an incline with sparse weed growth.  The other boat was catching fish, while ours had no action.  By this time, the fog had burned off, revealing blue, cloudless skies.  I switched to an emerald shiner swimbait, swimmed slowly just off of bottom.  I got one strike and had a fish on with this bait, but lost the fish on a jump.  I did not have another bite.  In retrospoect, I should have stayed with this bait since the sunny, clear skies called for realistic, slow moving baits.

We moved again, this time to emergent grass.  Again, the action was slow, but this location did produce some action.  I tried pitching jigs to the grass line and was rewarded with a lost jig.  Meanwhile, Spam continued to miss fish lol.  Our guide had set up another rod next to me with live bait, which hooked a few fish.  Some were right into the weedline while others were about 10 feet from the weedline.

We finally moved one last time to a weedbed about 50 yards from emergent grass.  Here, Spam finally landed a fish.  In fact, he got a couple, avoiding the big skunk.  I switched to a texas rigged creature bait, but again, to no avail.

Overall, the conditions called for realistic, slow moving bait for the lethargic bass.  As a result, live bait close to cover was the ticket on this day.