Fishy Start to Spring

Spring officially got underway last week, and I'm delighted to have gotten to start the season with four days of fishing (and catching!) I spent the first three days of the season on Arkansas' Lake Ouachita, fishing mostly a bass and a bit for crappie to take photos for work. I then strayed farther west, to a small lake in the Oklahoma portion of the Ouachita National Forest, to do a bit of bass fishing from my kayak for videos.

It was definitely a spring bite on Ouachita. The largemouths were shallow and in a pre-spawn mode, and spinnerbaits produced the best action. We mostly caught males, so the bigger females were most likely staged nearby. We also got some good spotted bass atop rocky points and sunken islands that were close to deeper water by dragging Carolina rigs and by swimming a Flash Mob Jr..

The best crappie action occurred in less than 3 feet and around buckbrush. We caught them by suspending curly tail grubs a couple of feet beneath Thill floats, casting close to the buckbrush and twitching rod tip just enough to rock the float and make the jig dance. They were hitting the jigs hard, more like what I'd expect from a bass, ripping the float out of sight in an instant. Big fun!

I only managed a few bass at the little lake, which was pretty busy on the first Friday of spring and with beautiful weather leading into the weekend. However, two of three were way up the lake's most significant creek arm, on a very shallow flat, and hit a Rebel Bluegill, which is a shallow crankbait that looks like you would expect it to based on the name.

Month of the Carp?

Landing a carp, which hit a Rebel Bluegill. Photo by Joe Sills.

In a lifetime of fishing all over the country, I've caught four carp on artificial lures. Three of those have been in the past few weeks. As noted in a previous blog, I caught grass carp on back-to-back days from two different lakes in Alabama earlier this month. Both were hooked in the mouth, and one hit a Rebel Bluegill crankbait, while the other attacked a Pop-R.

The Rebel Bluegill did the job again last week at Lake Powell. While fishing way up the San Juan River arm of the lake and catching mostly smallish smallmouths, I about had the rod snatched out of my hand from a strike, and at first I thought I'd hooked a seriously big largemouth or smallmouth. After a few minutes, though, I got the fish close enough to see it in the clear water and realized that yet another carp had grabbed a lure. Eventually I got the powerful fish close enough to get a hand beneath it's belly and land it.

From looking at the large unusual and unevenly distributed scales on the side of the fish and comparing photos to photos online, I'm almost positive it was a mirror carp. It definitely wasn't a grass carp, like the two from Alabama, so I got to add it to my 2015 species list. Now I just need a common carp to complete a "slam" of the most common carp species for this year.

This trip's smallmouths were also the first of this year for me. With April winding down, the count for '15 is at 16.