I think I’ve had about enough of dredging for Largemouth with a bottom setup on the fly rod. I sometimes have a hard time feeling the bite on spinning outfit with a Texas rig much less a sinking line with what sometimes seems like a cannon ball tied to the end of it. I’m thinking top water is probably a better game to play with Largemouth.
The weeds are coming on hard now. The warm weather in May seems like it has them a little ahead of schedule. While it can be frustrating to try to get boats and bugs through it’s great cover for the fish.
Once I got over the fly rod thing and started spin fishing with plastic on a Texas rig I could begin to regain some self esteem after being thumped once again by my son the aspiring Bassmaster thug.
Largemouth Bass
If you look close in front of the dorsal fin you can see where an Osprey got ahold of this guy. We watched one working the shoreline early in the morning and he was pure hell from the air. He took two small Bass within ten minutes which immediately set me to calculating how many fish this bird eats during an average day, a season and how many are actually stocked. The short of it was that Fish, Wildlife and Parks needs to stock more fish.
Largemouth Bass
Even though this lake, Blanchard Lake near Whitefish, is catch and release for Bass only, it seems to me that it could support a lot more of them. Total stocking in 2oo8 was 14,700 two inch fry from the Miles City Hatchery. I am guessing that between the Osprey, Blue Heron, Pike or more broadly, predators in general; they are eating the greater portion of the Largemouth being stocked.
If you figure a lone Opsprey eats 4 fish a day (probably conservative), over his 6 month stay, thats about 750 fish. 750 fish that are big enough for him (or me) to catch. A Blue Heron or a Pike on the other hand are not really limited by size constraints so they can pretty much eat anything they can get a hold of.
I have been on numerous lakes in the midwest and the northwest that have much denser populations of Bass and sometimes but not always, smaller water bodies that were not even catch and release.
My point? Now that we are going to subsidize Walleye fishing in eastern Montana at a hatchery (Fort Peck) that is only running at half capacity I don’t think it would be to much to ask to say, double the amount of Large and Smallmouth Bass stocking in the western part of the state?
Finally, from FishingJones:
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Your photos are giving me bass fever. I need to get my bead-headed nymphs and head to the water.
Bead heads for bass? I have tied Wooly buggers for Smallies with bead heads (big beads). If you are thinking about largemouth it goes beyond beads for me, I’m talking weight the size of 30-06 slug.