Crystal Lake – Practice Day – June 10th, 2006 | Rich Lindgren's Bass Fishing & Bassin' Blog

My partner John & I fished from 6am – noon. It was a cloudy and windy morning, air temps were in the low 60’s. Since I have a pretty solid knowledge of the shallow cover in the lake, we decided to focus on deep water. Although I had just bought a new frog rod from Fleet Farm and some new Bronzeyes from Sportsman’s Warehouse, so I wanted to go play with that before we left

We started on a hard bottom point area and I quickly caught a 2lb fish on the inside turn where it connects with the main weedline in about 8ft of water. That fish came on a mojo rigged green pumpkin Baby Ring Fry. Shortly after that I had a very nice fish on, that I brought to the surface and he shook free, no need to catch them during practice. So since the fish were there I tried to keep the boat moving, but I wanted to fish some more of the point to see where the fish were positioned and what kind of rocks and weeds were there. John caught one and lost one on a pink backed Rapala Husky Jerk . I then caught 3 fish over 3lbs and lost 1 on a Parrot DT6, only fish really ate the bait, the other two were hooked on the outside of the mouth. That leaves me to believe my color selection is probably a little off. I tried a Grn Olive Shiner color and did not catch anything on that, but I was switching back to the Parrot and not catch them anymore either. We hopped around a few other new areas that I had not previously fished and John caught one on Senko and brought a 2lb to the surface on a SWL Spinnerbait(Chart/white double willow).

We then decided to probe the shallows a bit. I had a little 12″ bass try to pull down my Natural Red Bronzeye Frog. I then started tossing in under some docks and on my 3rd dock a 4+ lb bass crushed it and swiftly landed him with my new 7’10” rod that I had bought, spooled with Power Pro Braided Line. About 5 casts later I had a blow up that I pulled away from, a little rusty on my frog fishing. I threw back in there with a Fork Special Ring Fry and pulled the fish up where I could see it, minimum 3lb, I decided not to set and just pull it away from the fish. I caught one more small keeper out of the pads on the frog and another 2.5lb under a dock, i just could not help from setting, too much fun. It is amazing the leverage you get with a almost 8ft rod on a long hook set

Then it was time to hit some graduation parties All in all, I would have had a solid 16-17lbs without beating on any spots. My partner managed 2 or 3 nice fish and lost a couple more that we saw. Hopefully the bite will be decent next Saturday, this lake can shutdown sometimes.