Monday on Deer Creek Trout and Smallmouth

Another Monday fish with Shifty.  He is getting used to this setup.  I like it as well.  I arrived at his place at 5:25 and he was pulling the boat out. Loaded up got breakfast and headed to the lake. It's nice to have Deer Creek in such close proximity and with so many species to choose from.

This morning we decided to troll for trout in the early morning and the for smallmouth bass in the late morning.  We launched at the state park and made our way up to the island lane and started trolling.

Shifty put in a Gulls Custom dodger and pink squid with a worm and I went all light today with my diver down to 30 feet and shallow crankbaits for the surface feeders.

We trolled through the lane and made the turn at brown trout corner and nothing. I put on a kastmaster as we went back to cliff point. As hot as it has been we thought we would be limited out by 9am or so but that wasn't the case today.  I finally got a nice Brown trout on the kastmaster as we made the turn at cliff point. Put it back down as we started back through the lane I got another Brown trout on the kastmaster. We were thinking okay then maybe they were just waking up late. Not another hit until we started to make the turn to go across the river channel and a Rainbow trout hit the shallow crankbait. Today we were on Shifty's boat so I only took my shore backpack and decided to fish with what was in there. That limited my choices more than I thought it would. Still, I had three trout in the live well. We trolled back through the island lanes and got nothing else. Shifty felt his trolling motor was losing charge and we decided to go after smallmouth bass before we lost all power to the Minnkota.

Shifty took us to the north end of the run on the west bank and we started throwing crankbaits. We fished for a bit before Shifty landed a small smallmouth bass. He was happy he knocked the stink off the front of the boat. It took a while before the next smallmouth bass was caught again by Shifty. This one was a nice sized smallmouth for DC. We cranked baits for the rest of the morning and just before we decided to call it I finally got one to hit a red craw pattern.

Tough fishing and talking to the other fishers on the water it was the same for everyone. We loaded the boat and I noticed a boat pulling in and it looked very familiar. So I went to talk to them and sure enough, it was Danny and his kids and some friends they were getting on for the afternoon/evening bite. I checked in with him later and the same outcome for his boat, and that is a rare thing for his boat not to have limits in the well. Summer doldrums may be setting in a little early or maybe it was the cold front that was coming in. Either way, it was a good morning fishing and not at work!