Jim K: Banks Lake - 6/16
I got on the water for a few hours early on Monday morning on Banks. Started raining soon after I started fishing in the Devil’s Punch Bowl, and a wind picked up out of the NW. With these conditions I quickly headed to the weed beds just south of Steamboat Rock on the main lake side of the point. I started casting a perch colored swim bait, just ticking the tops of the weeds at 6’ in about 10-12 FOW. My first cast resulted in a very huge boil just before I got my lure to the surface, but couldn’t see the fish… it was big though. With this follow, I picked up another rod with a Storm Wildeye swim shad in chartreuse / Silver color. On the next cast I caught the 21” fish shown in the picture. (3 lbs.) I cast for another half hour with only one bite. By now it was raining very hard. At the end of a drift & wanting to motor up to do another drift I went to put my rod into my rod holder. When It came in contact with my rod holder I got a shock that caused me to drop the rod. I picked the rod up and same thing happened the second time. There was no lightning in the area at all. Either way I decided to motor away from the area. I went a few miles until the rain subsided & I was next to shore / cliff & just waited for a while. I then returned to my weed bed. Rain was very light here by now. Now I picked up a 3/8 oz jig head with paddle tail & took a cast. My line just hung in the air & never came down until I started reeling it in, so back to the shore for a bit. Still there was no lightning or thunder to be seen or heard. After another wait, I returned when the rain almost stopped, and winds had subsided a bit again. It was now a bit lighter out, so with that and after having gone a bit without a bite on the chartreuse wildeye, I switched to a 3/8 oz purple pearl jig with pearl Pulse-R paddle tail 4” soft plastic. I made one cast, ticked the grass several times, and had two small strikes. (dinks?). My second cast was hit by the 25”, 5 lb. fish in the picture. I also caught two 12” walleye that I released. Not bad for about 2.5 hours on the water, and only 1.5 hours fishing. It was now 8AM & needed to return to the family at the camper to start our day’s planned activities. Wish I could have stayed. I bet I could have pulled a few more out of there if I had the time.