Crankbaits and Cutthroats at The Berry

Tuesday text:

Me: strawberry?

Shifty: sweet!

me: great pick you up at 6

Shifty: why 6?

me: the sun doesn't come up till 8

A half-hour later........................................

Shifty: no the weather channel says the sun will rise at 7:37 and I know you like to get there before the sun comes up.

me: fine you better be ready when I get there to pick you up.........

Shifty: crap, I hope it's not too early....

Thursday morning I arrive at 5:15 and wait till 5:45 for Shifty to get out of the house. This is from the person that wakes up at 4 am to go ice fishing and the sun doesn't rise till 8:30 am and I am the one that always wants to get going early.......hahahaha.

Harvest full moon at 5:15 am

So ya Thursday morning I text him as I am leaving to pick him up and say you better be ready, no reply. I get there and no lights are on.

We loaded and got on the road by 5:50 and still got to the lake before the sun came over the horizon and it was 23 degrees. This was after we stopped and got breakfast.

notice the frost on the windshield

We started trolling right out of the marina and headed for Haws Point. I put on a No. 9 rapala purple descent and a pink flatfish. Shifty put out a ghost lucky craft. Fifteen minutes later I had the first cutthroat trout in the boat on the purple descent. After a pic or two it was released. We continued to troll around Haws and down toward the old dam. 

Making a loop and going back up the same path we decided to try our luck with jigs, we fished them for about hour then went to crank baits. I put on a No. 9 rapala jointed crawfish, we fished a bay that looked okay and was spotting fish on the finder. I hooked into another nicer Cutthroat trout at the boat. I mean this fish was inside my shadow when it hit. I yelled at Shifty to grab the net, not knowing how well it was hooked, and it wasn't very well, the hook fell out in the net.

We fished here for a bit longer and got nothing else so we decided to go to the meadows. We went to the east bank and started casting again I left the rapala on, and Shifty started throwing everything in his bag, he even resorted to powerbait.

We moved slowly along the bank and were seeing fish rolling on top for the BWO hatch that was happening. We knew they were active at least and kept throwing lures. I finally hooked into another nice cutthroat on the same rapala. Funny to watch a number of boats move after we caught one. We fished this stretch for a while but yielded no other strikes.

I suggested we move into the narrows and try our luck there. We trolled our way into the narrows and then started casting again. I tied on a kastmaster red/white and used it for the rest of the time. I finally coaxed one into biting and landed another cutthroat. A picture or two and we released it. We fished until the wind got bad and decided to call it a day. Loading was a little fun but we made it wind and all. We stopped and talked to John Phillips to see how he and his crew did, they were in the meadows all morning and were tossing jigs and caught 10 fish, so it wasn't fast and furious for any of us but it was a beautiful day on the pond.