We set on mid afternoon on Saturday, the sun was blazing and the temperature was in the upper 90's. As it turns out even the fish weren't too happy about this, but before we get to far into the fishing part of the tale, lets do the setup.
For this trip we kept the two rods as we have left them at the end of the first movie, both with top water poppers, one frog one fish. We had an additional cast member for the sequel, a rod borrowed from my wife's' uncle, operated by Stevens dad, Mark. This was initially setup with some unknown jig, that would soon bite the dust.
As the last post had the map of the location, i wont add another, but if you can refer back to it, we decided to try fishing on the north bank this time, a little west of the pier we fished from previously.
We parked in front of some town houses, and walked down the street with all of our gear, looking for some lake access that didn't involve marching through someones back yard. It didn't take too long to find a path, and we headed towards the lake conveniently not reading the sign that stated you need an Ashburn Village ID to fish on this lake. On a side note, what HOA issues ID cards to residents, seems like they should try spending some money on clearing snow and trash, rather than issuing ID cards to residents! Anyway, we planned to plead ignorance if approach by community cops, or whomever is supposed to enforce that "law".
As we didn't see that sign, the first thing that stuck us, was that there was almost no access to the lake, a wall of reeds and other vegetation was blocking us, so we started walking west looking for some gaps in the forest, of which there weren't many. Any small gaps there were, had 10 feet of weeds and lilies and algae between the bank and the open water, which is a serious pain for us lazy shore fisherman. After walking for what felt like 10 miles in the blazing heat, we found some space that enabled all three of us to throw a line in. Steven and I had, as regular followers of the blog know, learnt to deal with the abundance of water bound vegetation, using a somewhat dangerous, flicking motion, to make the lure hop over the last 10 feet of water, however Mark, was apparently not briefed on this technique, and almost immediately got his jig stuck in something, and broke the line.
Steven and I were not having much better luck, admittedly we still had out lures attached, but had seen nothing, no action at all. So we decided to set Marks line up with a bobber to see if there was anything at all alive in the water.
The bobber wasn't over successful, there was some mild interest in it, it giggled a few times, but for the first ten or so minutes, nothing. Steven and I continued to work the top waters during this time, until we saw the bobber drop and Mark begin to real in his prize. We rejoiced at the 4 inch sunfish, oh what a catch! Sadly there is no picture to convince you all that we did indeed catch a fish, so you will just have to take my word for it.
Mark managed to inject some comic value into proceedings whilst working the bobber, apparently some firm looking ground wasn't so firm and he managed to submerge himself in 3-4 inched of pond mud. He said he was looking for an excuse to get some new sneakers, so no damage done.
As we were starting to loose all hope that there was any life beyond a single small sunfish, I spotted a pretty large bass swimming slowly east along the shore line, about 20 feet out. It swam right past the bobber, actually having to take a little deviation to avoid it, I cast my top water out in front and worked it across its path. The bass completely ignored it. So I reeled in, and ran up the shore a little bit, and thew it out again, this time the bass at least moved towards the lure, but didn't seem to have much interest beyond that. So once again, I reel in and run up the bank again, throwing out the lure in front of it and worked it across its path. This time the bass struck, tool the lure for a fraction of a second and then just moved on. It was like the thing didn't have hooks on it, I am pretty sure that guy was just playing with me.
At this point the realization that it was just too hot for top water set in for both Steven and myself, so we both switched to some bottom water jigs. Steven went for a worm jig, one of those long black worms with the hook cunningly hidden in the body of the worm, and i went for a little weighted minnow jig, both of which would sink to the bottom and hopefully awaken whatever was fast asleep down there.
Our luck almost immediately changed, or at least Stevens luck almost immediately changed, I was still getting nothing. Steven was getting repeated hits on his worm, a couple of them strong enough to cut the worm in half, so we added a new worm or two and kept going. The worm, with its enclosed hook seemed much better at working its way through the vegetation, my minnow on the other had was very adept and tricking me into thinking I had a bite, then disappointing me by actually just dragging up immense amounts of pond weed.
We slowly worked our way back east along the bank, throwing in when we found an opening, Steven getting bites every so often, Mark watching a bobber just sit there, and me, well I spent the rest of the day clearing weed and algae from my line an hook.
The one saving grace of the trip was that in one location, a little east of where we parked, Steven found an area that was producing hits almost every time he threw in, and he managed to pull a reasonable bass out on one of the hits.
Nothing to wrote home about, but on a day like today, it was glorious.
We continued working up the shoreline until we hit the main road, with nothing much happening in the water, at which point we decided to call it a day, and head home for some beers.
What did we learn from this trip, well the first is don't fish in the middle of the day when it is 100 degrees, people don't like it and neither to the fish.
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