So many fish so little time to post....

I haven't really posted a fishing report in about a week so I have some catching up to do...

I spent one evening seining small crayfish out of a small creek that's loaded with them. Crayfish will stay alive nicely for several days with little or no trouble as long as you do a couple easy things. One is keep them cool. I like to use an old cooler and then sit it in a cool shady place like the garage. The other is don't drown your craws. If you do not keep an air pump going they will use up all the oxygen in the water quickly and die. But here's the cool part. If they can just keep their gills wet they can breathe air. Just put a half an inch of water in your cooler and throw in a bunch of grass for them to climb on and they will keep fine.
So I took a bucket of craws, a spinning rod, a pack of old fashioned baitholder hooks and some small splitshot to another slightly bigger creek. What a blast, below every small riffle in the little knee to waist deep hole I'd catch a couple channels. Little guys, maybe a pound or pound and half on average but one right after another. Wading wet in a little creek catching tons of little catfish it doesn't get much better on a hot day...

Then I met Chris on the GMR. We fished a beautiful section of river, again wading wet and again killing the fish! I think Chris was using Vic's five inch grub from what I saw and I was using a three inch clear with silver glitter grub. Chris said he must have caught 12 or 15 and fished about half as long as I did so I'm guessing at least 30 or 35 easy for the two of us. Several times I caught fish on back to back casts. Mostly smallmouth bass in the ten inch range but we both caught three or four nice channels apiece too on lures. The fish were stacked up in a swift run of water right before it poured over a riffle between two little islands. A swell trip. Walking out I told Chris I'm only going to catch three or four tomorrow but one or two will be hawgs because I'm going to the pig pen...

I hadn't been back to the pig pen in a week and it was killing me. Conditions had been the same as they had been, low water and hot. Exactly the conditions that made big smallies pile into the swift oxygenated pool I call the pig pen. All evening I could hear thunder roll all around me and several times it got dark but it never did rain. The dark cloudy skies made the fish bite and I ended up catching five, which is good for the pen. I was fishing a clear with green back curly shad with the mylar instead of glitter. Which was what she hit on. And then jumped seemingly five feet in the air. And came down still connected to the lure after the jump so I was I was happy. The photo if anything doesn't do her justice. After that jump and fight I felt honored to have been lucky enough to release such a grand fish...