Journal of a Minnesota Angler

Species: Largemouth Bass
Size: ~14″
Lure used: white pearl super fluke (first cast of the night!)

Date: 6/19/2009
Time: 7pm-9:30pm
Body of water: Lake Owasso
Location: Shoreview, MN
Weather Conditions: overcast and rain

My neighbor, Mark, and I went out after dinner and were out on the lake by 7pm.  There were some ominous clouds coming in, but we figured we could always get off the lake if we saw lightning.  On my first cast using a super fluke, the retrieve didn’t feel quite right, so I tugged on it a little harder and it tugged back. I set the hook and caught the nice 14″ largemouth above.

A few casts later, Mark caught a nice 15″, also on a white pearl super fluke and got 3 or 4 more strikes before it started sprinkling.  He’s new to using the super fluke, so he wasn’t able to pull those last few hits in. He bought hooks based on what I had described last week, but his didn’t have as big an offset as the ones I usually buy. That could have had something to do with his misses.

We saw some rain go by on the West end of the lake and we hoped we had escaped the storm, but about 20 minutes later, it started sprinkling where we were. Within 5 minutes, the rain started to come down hard.  Neither of us felt we needed to go in, since we saw a clearing in the clouds headed our way, but the fishing got really quiet.  There was no action at all during the rain.

When the rain stopped, the sun broke through the clouds and formed a cool double rainbow. We had been casting flukes before and during the rain without much luck, so we decided to try some lindey rigging with live bait to see if we could catch some walleye.  Mark used a night crawler and I used a leech. We hovered around a bit of structure where Mark usually catches fish, but he wasn’t even getting hits from panfish that usually attack worms in this area.  I finally caught a small 12″ largemouth with the lindey rig and we figured the fish might be coming back in after the rain stopped, so we put away the lindey rigs and started casting again.

We had been going up and down one shore, but at the beginning of the night got most of the action in front of several docks.  We decided to go back to that spot again.  I hadn’t had any real action since my first cast, but finally hooked  a small 12 1/2″ largemouth on a super fluke near the end of the night.  Mark also got a 12″ largemouth before we packed up.

Other than the quiet during the storm, it was a decent night.  Five fish and a bunch of hits in a little over two hours.