Road trip!

Thirsty for open water bass fishing, Fishkid, Jaypee the HHF, Keith, and myself took a 5 1/2 ride down to Carbondale, IL for some open water bass fishing.

Earlier in the week, the conditions appeared extremely favorable. Temps peaked in the mid 70s. As the weekend approached, the weather forecast flipped. On Thursday we saw that the weekend would yield temps in the upper 40s with on and off precipitation. Well, that wasn’t enough to discourage the game plan. It was on.

Fishkid and Jaypee departed Chicago around 3 on Friday; Keith and I left shortly after. About 4 hours into the car ride, we gave Fishkid a call to see where he was at. His exact response, verbatim, “Yo. Bottom line is I’m in a ditch.”

Yeah. Supposedly his GPS told him to take a left into a cornfield or something. After a $65 Tow Truck call, he was back on the road again. Not a great start for him.

After a night’s rest, we went to work. The target was the SIU campus lake. There are plenty of lakes in Southern IL that hold some big bass, but nearly all require a boat. Jaypee chose the campus lake because it was shore fishermen friendly.

It didn’t take long for Jaypee to hook into his first fish. Soon after I picked up my first open water bass of 2010 on a black skirted spinner bait. I had to take a picture because it was my first…

Both of our fish were shorts.

Day 1 was pretty tough. We never really found a pattern that worked well. A couple were picked up on traps, a few on spinner baits, and another few on craws. As a group, we caught around a dozen fish. Nothing spectacular. Here is a picture of the typical sized bass we got on day 1 -

Keith was the star of Day 1. He managed to catch the only legal bass, and it was a beauty. I put her around the 4# mark. This fish ate a spinner bait off of a wind blown shoreline.

Day 2’s weather looked about the same as Day 1 – cold with a little bit of rain mixed in.

Just like Day 1, the bite was tough to say the least. We worked our way through dinks again, and couldn’t really dial in a pattern.

Keith had managed to catch around 4 bass in the 10-12″ class, and Jaypee stuck a decent one he said was around 16 inches or so on a spinner. I decided to wander off from the group, and focus on coves of the lake where the wind was less of a factor.

I finally found something to work, which was a black skirted spinner with orange blades. I was chucking the bait over some fallen trees, and slowly retrieving it, bumping into logs and crap on the way in. I got four bass out of the spot, with two being decent. The second bass was absolutely hideous. It had the body length of a 4-5 lber, but was super skinny and looked like it had a disease.

We soon wrapped up the day. It felt good about sticking a couple of fish before we hit the road. It was a good trip with some good peeps, and I’m looking forward to the Trout Mafia Bass 2010 Tour’s next stop – Normal, IL with local legend Kenny Lookingbill.

The water down there was also pretty cold – I’d guess around 40-43ish. However, it didn’t stop Fishkid from getting in the lake to retrieve his favorite trap that got lodged in a stump.

Until next time…