Sunday May 12, 2019 – Despite it being Mothers Day  no mother stripers were caught–at least no big mamas.  The winds on the lake have been fluky this week.   The pattern seems to be wind in the early morning with a lull around 9:00 with increasing winds in the afternoon.   Today there was a very small window to fish between 9:00 and 1:00.   The word on the street was that the lake was pretty slow yesterday.   Ken Oda however hooked and lost a big fish yesterday and I wanted to put some time into the Bay of Pigs to find one.   At least the big ones are still biting.  I fished the Bay of Pigs from 9:00 to  11:00 and only got one fish off the dam near Guardrail.  There is a storm front coming in this week and the water temps were around 61 degrees.

I reconfigured the electronics in the boat last week removing the Lowrance HD and moving the two Hummingbird Helix Units.     I put the Helix 9 on the console and the Helix 7 back where I fish on the starboard stern.   The back unit is setup with chirp down sonar and the dash mounted Helix 9 I use mainly for chart nav, I Pilot programing and 360 Sonar.  The new configuration is very usable.  I like having a personal screen in the back of the boat.   With Chirp, I can see fish on both sides of the boat out 20 feet under the boat.   I can glance up at the 360 sonar to see what direction the schools move.  I also mounted an old Humingbird 859CI on the bow.  All the units are on the same network and can share each others transducers.

I spent the last part of the day from 11:00 to 1:00 fishing the racks which were  very productive.   A school of stripers was holding tight to the walls.  The lake has dropped another 10 feet since last week.  They must be letting water out like mad.   Schools of stripers were circling the the pillars and the sonar was lit.    It was pretty much non stop catching  till I saw a line of white caps moving across the lake.   Tim Anderson was also fishing the racks on the opposite side of me  and he took off pretty fast when he spotted the wind coming.  They had to get back to Dinosaur Point before the lake started to get really rough.   I like launching from Basalt when fishing the BOP  and the east side.  The racks continued to be productive for another  hour till it because hard to just stand in the boat.   I put my life preserver on  and  left the Racks at  12:30,  It was one of the roughest rides back to the Basalt Launch that I can remember.  I took my time and ran along the shoreline.    I was the last boat out at Basalt and it was only 1:30.