Hello once again and welcome to the Saturday Fishing Report.
It was cold. Let's just leave that there. It was also sunny. One of the best places to fish when it's cold and sunny is the park, which has been closed for some ungodly reason. (Yes, I'm still griping about that.) Anyway, I went out a couple times and got skunked. Then Thursday, I went out early to a place that has finally become available due to dropping lake levels.
It was cold, it was windy, and I got nothing casting in amongst the submerged trees that have been so kind to me in the past, so I moved around to a cove out of the wind. I finally got some bites for my biteless week. Last cast down the grooved concrete boat ramp and as I'm reeling in, ostensibly to remove the worm from my hook and go home, it feels like my bite sinker is knocking the grooves. Then I see something at the end of my line, but it looks like I hooked someone else's lure. Then I'm like 'holy shit that's a fish.' I get it out of the water and it's wriggling all over the place. And I have no clue what it is.
It's 5-6" long and cigar shaped, like a sucker but without the suction cup mouth. Kind of a brown/bronze above with a bright white belly. I think it might be some kind of darter, but my fish book doesn't show any darters longer than like 3.5". Might be a chub of some kind, but the mouth looks wrong. I thought about bringing it home to investigate further, but there are endangered little fish species in this lake somewhere and since I couldn't positively identify it as a regular fish, I didn't want to take the chance. It took the decision out of my hands anyway when it wriggled free and dropped into the shallows. Away it swam.
I tried looking it up in my fish book. I tried researching it online. Not a single damn picture looks enough like what I caught to be able to say I caught that kind of fish. :shrug: Another one of life's little mysteries.
Better luck next week, I guess.
From the sounds of the guides around here, winter fishing has begun, though, and that means deep. Oh well. I'll just drown worms, hope for a fluke of some kind to bring me fish, and wait for spring fishing to begin again.
Could that sucker have been an eel of some kind?
ReplyDeleteStill sucks that they closed the park. Grrr.
Here's to a little bit warmer weather before the cold hits right at Christmas!
I had that thought, too, but the fin configuration was wrong for an eel.
DeleteI understood when they closed the park in May because it was mostly flooded, but this is ridiculous.
Yay for warmer! And even the cold snap at Christmas isn't supposed to be tragicful - just in the mid-forties. I'm loving this winter so far.