Had a picnic at my daughters house this afternoon, so I only had a few hours to fish this morning. Hatch is only about 45 minutes, and it’s pretty easy to fish the whole place very thoroughly in 3 hours or so. So that’s where I headed.
Water temp low 80s, mildly green — about normal for Hatch in mid summer. Almost all the milfoil appears to be gone. There’s a little bit of black coontail here and there, and of course the pads.
Caught a bunch of fair-to-middlin fish on El Saltos, and a few on the Oz as well. All from the west side and the north end. The fun part of the morning was about 10 minutes of topwater action with the frog. But not in the pads. Open water, 5 to 20 yards outside the pads. I was fishing my way along the pads, when something swirled 20 feet or so behind me. I had the frog rod in my hand, so I sent a cast to where a fish had just fed. Walked the lure about 3 feet and got hammered. Kept doing it until I felt I’d exhausted it. I felt like Dean Rojas walking that frog over open water. I actually only caught three fish doing it, but two of them were my best fish of the day (about 2.5 & 4#).
No pictures. Brought the camera, but not the memory card. DUH. I did shoot some video, but this laptop’s firewire port doesn’t seem to be compatible with my cable, and my tower is DOA. I’ll figure out a way to get it off the camera eventually.
OK, got the video off the camera, but it didn’t come out all that well. Here’s a short clip. The jump in the tape on the hookset is because I knocked the camera mount half over when I set the hook, so I had to run to the back of the boat, re-aim the camera, then finish landing the fish.
Why was the milfoil gone?
Not sure, but it seem to happen every summer in the pond. Not usually until august, but we’re way warmer than normal, and everything is ahead of schedule.
I’ve been losing milfoil too, this year and last. I have attributed it the wet overcast summers we’ve had both years. Milfoil seems to need a LOT of light. Higher water levels (but clear), have left less shallows for milfoil to reach the light. And the clouds too I think. In a couple ponds, filamentous algae killed off milfoil. Dunno how much temperature plays a role, but it has been remarkably cool too. Only a few ponds have good milfoil this year, and they are shallow and the clearest, so I think light is primary. With room to grow, coontail and threadleaf (sago) have expanded. In a couple of ponds I was actually targeting threadleaf! Normally, it doesn’t hold fish well and is a pain to fish through. But that’s what there was, and some ‘gills and bass were using it. Keeps things interesting.
Paul, we have a lot of lakes where the vegetation grows different every year. Some years, conditions are prime for milfoil, other years, what we call ‘black coontail’ or ‘crispus maximus’ dominates the same areas. And other years, large areas of prime veggies seem to be entirely missing.