So Lets Dive Right in with My Very First Blog Post
Today has been just spectacular here in northern California where I live. The sky is clear cool blue with a few clouds moving slow. The trees are putting on their fall finery. The tree squirrels are scurrying here and there storing up winter fodder, and the sound of leaf blowers can be heard throughout the neighborhood. This is a very drastic, quickly evolved change from just one week ago when the local temperatures were in the high 90’s and low 100’s. Totally welcome though!
Since I live only a few minutes from one of California’s largest lakes (Shasta), I spend quite a goodly amount of time fishing this body of water, but not exclusively. From only a few minutes drive to a couple of hours there are a multitude of great fishing places I can access, and I do. More on some of them at a later post. Today I would like to share some information about my experiences a couple of days ago.
Trolling on Lake Shasta
The timing of the bite was off for a few days when the air temperature began to decline. The bass in Shasta were on the bite up to a couple hours after sunrise, and then for about an hour just before dark. This past Sunday the fish seemed to be foraging all day. I picked up spotted bass, and small mouth from early till late. I hit the big rainbow trout and Chinook salmon late in the day. I will spend more time with what I was using and all a little later, but now I am going to present an issue I found really disturbing.
One of the rainbow’s I boated was big and fat. I ended of killing this fish by accident. Sometimes that happens. This fish had swallowed my hoochie lure down deep, and I messed the fish up getting the hook out. The fish measured right at 18 inches long, and as I mentioned earlier, really fat. I attributed the extra girth to gorging on shad, but in hind sight, the fish didn’t regurgitate any of the little bait fish when I handled it. When I got home and cleaned the fish my cleaning knife nicked the stomach which literally exploded with a couple of plastic baits. These plastics were about 8 inches long and maybe 1/2 inch in diameter. How on earth would the fish pass these things?
I am going to do a little research about this subject and post my findings, and questions some time soon. I hope someone else could weigh in on this too, but for now I go and be Ketchinnee.