Man I was pumped to show Dan the best day in years at the forebay but great makes good feel bad. We launched about the same time as yesterday but the morning was fogged in at 9:00. It was warm and still because of the fog. I headed out slowly to Check 12 and it was a good thing I was going slow and watchful. We closely approached a couple boats of gear guys hooked up on fish already. I navigated to yesterdays spots in the near zero visibility fog and was disappointed that the birds were not working last yesterday. Also there appeared to be less water moving through check 12. It was nothing like yesterday. The down sonar and Panoptix did show large concentrations of fish in the channel. They seemed to be resting and not moving much. The sonar fish tend to face up current and move into the current when the water is moving faster. Today they were pointed in all directions and spread out not moving much. It also looked like they were hugging the bottom. We picked up a couple fish in the Channel but they were very picky about presentation. Stop and Drop, Strip and Crawl seemed to be the only way to get them to eat. Maybe its a visibility thing.
We decided to check the other spots and we managed a few fish but no large concentrations of fish were spotted elsewhere. The fish still seem to be hanging to the north where the water is coming in . We checked the powerhouse and found a little bit of current coming in and got hopeful. Even though there was current there, we couldn’t find any schools with the sonar or any singles that would bite.
An odd thing happened at 4:00pm. We were fishing the Flats on the North side and fish and birds started working all over the place like they were a couple weeks ago at Mederios. We chased the boils and birds and put flies right on target and didn’t get immediately hit. It was exciting seeing all this action around the boat and I had the trolling motor cranked chasing the boils but the fish seemed to be moving very fast. Dan and I finally fished to boils near the shoreline and we both hooked up on our first cast. At least we know they were hitting our flies. We fished the boils for an hour with very few bites and hookups despite seeing fish everywhere boiling and birds working bait within casting distance. I talked to a local who came out only to fish that last hour of the day and he caught ten in an hour casting an umbrella rig with flukes. I think next time I fish the boils, I’m going to fish two flies with pulse discs on an intermediate line to see If they want to eat a loud parade.
It really wasn’t that bad of a day. We had pleasant weather conditions even though the fog never really burned off and it cooled off in the early afternoon when we saw clouds through the fog. Maybe a front was coming in dropping the barometer. We had around 15 fish to the boat and two doubles plus tons of excitement in the evening chasing fish but It just wasn’t anything like yesterday. Great makes good feel bad. Hope Dan wasn’t too disappointed.