Indian Lake....

I pretty much choked my season away yesterday and it was more of the same. Its June and I already cant wait for this season to be over and move on to next year. There absolutely has to be something physically wrong with the way Im setting the hook on fish because I have no explanation for why I am having so much trouble landing fish. Its an epidemic as far as Im concerned, a pandemic, its been a nightmare, a long viscious nightmare of headshake/jump then lure flying out of the water. Ive cost myself thousands of dollars, numerous quality finishes and most importantly, my dignity.  Its fishing, its not the end of the world but it feels like it.

So let me tell you about Indian Lake.   First off,  its 120 miles to the lake from my house so I had to get up at 2:30am which is zero fun, especially if you go to bed at a normal time like normal people do.  I get up and start driving. A note about driving at 3am, anyone on the road at 3am is either drunk or getting drunk or going fishing so you got to be on your A-game because EVERY car is a potential head on collision. Luckily I didnt have any run-ins with DUIers but the craziness wasnt completely missing from the morning. A mile from I-70 I see, what appears to be a child knealing on both knees in the side of the road. WTF?  I am not ashamed to admit that Ive been known to "see" things that didnt exist and after a double take I usually am left wondering,  why did I think I saw that?  This time, I drove by it so quickly there wasnt a chance for a double take.  I get to I-70 and I tell myself "what if that was a kid, I have to turn around because that shit aint safe".  So I turn around, start to get close and see what I had hoped was nothing more then my imagination, a person knealing on both knees facing a guardrail on the side of RT 13.  I do another illegal u-turn, while towing a 21 foot bass boat and I pull of the side of the road and I yell over to the opposite side "HEY!, What are you doing? Are you ok?.  This young girl pops up, sobbing, says she doesnt know where she is, where her car is and she doesnt know what to do. I ask her how old she is and if she is hurt, she says she is 22 years old and that she wasnt hurt. I then ask her one more obvious question, "are you drunk?"  I already knew the answer but I get a definitive "yes" to the question. What the hell do I do now? I tell her to get in my truck and that I will take here up to the gas station so she can get help. We stop at the station and the manager called the cops. No clue the outcome though for all I know shes in jail. She looked alot like this....





Thats how my day started and it went down hill from there. It took a little over 10lbs to win, I lost several keeper fish and one tank that I have no good estimate of and I ended the day with around 6lbs on only 4 keepers.  Im so sick of the excuses, I have been on winning fish over and over again and I havent gotten it done.  For awhile I thought it was just a bad streak but clearly there is a technical flaw in something Im doing and I have no idea what it is. I need to figure something out or its just going to keep happening.

Thanks for the support even though Ive sucked terribly this year. To the reader that asked the question on the last post,  dont pay any attention to some of these people, its the interwebs, lot of crazies out there...

Later
S.T.P.

Practice? We talkin about practice?

So, Indian Lake is up next, sunday is the day. I need a solid tournament (top 10) to stay in contention for a state team spot in the Ohio Bass Federation. I currently sit in 10th place, 7 points out of the last spot. I have been extremely busy with other stuff lately and beleive it or not, my only day I could make the 120 mile, one way trip to Indian Lake was last friday. It was worth it for the fishing but Ive convinced myself that the stuff that I did last week will be of little help this sunday.  The weather is going to be completely different so there is no way I can expect to have another day like I did friday but Im hoping the fish are in the same areas so my adjustments will have to be only technique related, not necessarily different water.

Im praying its not a re-deux of last year. I had a great practice leading up to a tournament on Indian Lake last year and ended up struggling majorly in the tournament.  This past friday I caught an insane sack of bass that was anchored by a spawned out female that weighed between 5 and 6lbs.  A true Ohio tank. If she would have been pre-spawn or even had regained some mid-summer weight, I think she could have been 7+, add that donkey to the multiple 3lbers I caught, I would have been culling 2.5lbers. Conservative estimate had me at 15lbs, realistic estimate 17lbs and  a possible but doubt it bag of 18lbs.


So at the risk of taking a wicked beating,  I feel pretty good about sunday.  I guess we will see how it goes.

Go Celtics!  Game 6 tonight!