Farm 13 that is, just outside of Fellesmere, Florida. Chrissie started us off this morning with the Chug Bug again and had three fish to the boat to our nothing. Not being real slow my thoughts turned to topwater for her boyfriend. I rigged up a 6’6″ Shimano Compre with a Stadic reel and 15 pound Power Pro without a leader this time. I tied on a Zoom Horny Toad for him and showed him the way to fish it and how to get the speed right. About ten minutes later we turned parallel to a stump flat and he sailed a cast out over it. About three turns of the handle and the bait disappeared into a big surface boil and Todd leaned back into the rod. The fish surged towards the nearest stump but he managed to turn it and got her headed out towards the boat. After a couple of minutes of chaos I slipped the net under her and lifted his biggest ever bass into the boat. She tipped the scales at a cool 7.85 lbs.
I would like to say that our day went on like that but the wind came up and made it quite difficult to move the boat around in the shallow stump fields. I had anticipated that might be the case based on the weather forecast and had brought a bucket of minnows so we could try for some Crappie. We headed into the spillway area of the marsh and beach the boat on the leeward side. I got everyone rigged up with some lighter line and we got right to it. This is the third time this year we had a shot at the specks but we never saw one. We caught a ton of decent catfish and a handful of big Bluegills which certainly kept us entertained during the worst of the wind. Todd also managed a couple of decent bass while tossing a Black/Blue Flutter Worm into the deeper water and working it slowly back to the boat.
The wind dropped back down to reasonable about two p.m. so we headed back out for a last crack at the bass. Todd nailed one almost immediately on the Flutter Worm and it was pushing five pounds. I was tossing a white Terminator Spinnerbait on a Compre/Curado combo with no luck. The conditions seemed ideal for the spinnerbait with the wind blowing across the flat but I only connected with one 4 lber while Todd and Chrissie were catching them on the Flutter Worm. I finally broke down and switched over as well. The trick was to cast ahead of the boat to give the bait a chance to hit bottom without any wind drag on the line. We caught close to twenty fish in the last hour and a half and they ran between three and five pounds. It looks like they are starting to move up to spawn on the full moon. If the weather holds up it is going to be a lot of fun this week.
Rick Greene
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