The 2pm kid-duty-switch-off agreement put the kibosh on
hopes of returning to my salty big water conquests.
Instead, little creeks became our stadium.
And we came to play.
By the time the first rays of light pierced through the trees, Jeff Lockhart, Matt Anderson, and I were already well into our first creek. A few small bass had been hooked and quickly released before finding what we were hoping for. Snakehead.
The 22"er struck Jeff's frog imitation in less than a foot of water. Our expectations of a furiously savage fight as described by others encountering the invasive specie were muted by the fact that it quickly had a huge amount of vegetation around the line and covering it's face. Regardless, we were ecstatic to confirm our hunch. The area is not known to hold snakeheads but we thought it was worth a shot.
As the day went on our search for more only yielded a few suspicious wakes. However we were still all smiles with the abundance of other life in the area. The little creeks were holding tons of baitfish and the largemouth bass were waiting around nearly every bend or dip to ambush them. Weedless, weightless flukes and frogs yielded a little less than a dozen bass with most of them in the 18" range. Topwater blow ups never get old and it was thoroughly enjoyable to watch bass take the fluke only a few feet from the kayak.
Matt got into double digits of bass as well on various swimbaits and senkos. In a larger part of the creek, Jeff landed the biggest bass of the day going a little over 21". At one point, I kept getting short strikes on the fluke when I finally set the hook into something that surprised us all for this time of year. The good sized yellow perch made me switch to the smaller set up with a little white grub. The following 3 casts rendered 3 more perch with the biggest going a bit over 11". Matt scored one just shy of citation at 11 3/4". Not too long after that, I lucked out with a new specie checked off my bucket list; bowfin. It tore up the baby bass fluke and provided a most satisfying fight on relatively light tackle. Unfortunately, my GoPros turned themselves off due to the heat and the 23"er flopped out of my hands just before Jeff could click the shutter.
For a relatively short trip, it was really a blast. Jeff added one more specie for the day with a decent crappie from under a duck blind. The call of the salt may be strong, but if weather and timing doesn't work out, we'll definitely be up for some more skinny sweetwater shenanigans.
As the day went on our search for more only yielded a few suspicious wakes. However we were still all smiles with the abundance of other life in the area. The little creeks were holding tons of baitfish and the largemouth bass were waiting around nearly every bend or dip to ambush them. Weedless, weightless flukes and frogs yielded a little less than a dozen bass with most of them in the 18" range. Topwater blow ups never get old and it was thoroughly enjoyable to watch bass take the fluke only a few feet from the kayak.
For a relatively short trip, it was really a blast. Jeff added one more specie for the day with a decent crappie from under a duck blind. The call of the salt may be strong, but if weather and timing doesn't work out, we'll definitely be up for some more skinny sweetwater shenanigans.
