This is the longest I've gone into the new year without fishing for a while...but finally made it for my first day. I wasn't expecting much...I usually fish for stripers, and winter is usually tough for me. The lake is near full, and there's some floating debris around, but it's not too bad. It's great to see the hills all green again.
I started out driving around checking the meter...stripers were around 80 feet deep all over the place. A few years ago, that would have meant anchor up and start cutting sardines, but that hasn't worked for me for a couple years now so I never got around to doing that, even though I had some frozen sardines. I tried jigging a spoon in some of them to no avail.
I finally decided to head into a cove...I picked Necktie, and see if the bass wanted to play. I found a few willing customers on secondary points that wanted to eat a nightcrawler. The biggest one I landed was maybe 14 inches...I hooked a nicer model, but it went straight into a snag. I gave it a minute or so to try to find its way out, but after about half that time the line stopped moving, and I was just stuck on the snag. With 4 lb. line, the bush won that one.
It was a beautiful morning before the next storm blows in...nice to get out.