When do the New-born's Start Learning?

I you have access to a dock, take a slow quiet walk out on the dock or peer and look down into the water around the pilings or other dock or walkway structure, you might see a large classroom full of new bass fry gathered around the structure. We are now in the post-spawn period for bass and nature is already starting it education of the young fish. Less than an inch long, I recently watched a school of hundreds of tiny fry rapidly moving from one piling to another as if they were being taught the safety rules of survival. When I moved and my shadow moved, the school of fish also scattered but rapidly returned to a tight school near another piling. When I tapped on the deck, they again scattered and then re-gathered to hide.

My guess is that these small bass were no more than one week old and they already knew the basic rule of survival. Each time they noticed me they would scatter but then they would quickly re-group tightly together, apparently knowing that there was safety in numbers. If the small fish had already learned this rule in less than a month after their birth, can you imaging how smart they will be when they are one year old? And some say that fishing is not a skill!

Working Hard for the Fish

Howie Anger, a former Mooresville resident who moved to Nashville, recently visited me for two days. The weather was grest and there were plenty of fish on the sonar but we really had to work to catch them. Howie did manage to catch a few nice crappie and a dozen medium sized bass. However the fish were not very active, hanging near the bottom. catfish were nowhere to be seen.

With the water temperature around 66 degrees, why were the fish deep. Don't know and I am having trouble finding big schools of bass. The crappie seem to be plentiful but bass are scarce. Medium sized shiners are getting scarce. The supplier had no mediums this week so I attributed the slow bite due to the larger bait fish that I was using, especially with the crappie. Lets take advantage of the good weather this week and get out on the lake to fish.

Social Distancing While Fishing

There has been a noticeable different in lake activity during the virus period this year. With the schools closed the boat and PWC activity during the week has increased significantly and unfortunately many if not most of the added traffic appears to have no knowledge of the rules of the water and the courtesy that should be directed at others on the water.
Fishing has also been effected. I have increased my personal time on the water because it is a great way to practice social distancing while keeping myself busy while the rest of the world has stopped. Recently I witnessed another effect that the virus is having on lake fishing, a serious shortage in live bait. Bait suppliers normally deliver live bait to the local stores on Wednesday and Saturday, but last weekend with the fine weather predicted, must stores sold out of bait in a few short hours after they received it. I had planned to take out my Son and a friend of his on Monday and I expected that i could get my bait on Sunday morning but found that everyone was sold out. I found one distributor that had a few Striper shiners left so I took them, hoping that the larger size wouldn't bother the bass. I was wrong, the shiners were too large and the fishing was very slow. By the time I realized the problem it was late in the afternoon and I selectively looked for the smaller bait to finish the day and immediately got results. We caught several big crappie and ran into a nice school of bass just before quitting. My Son Craig and his friend Mike are shown with some of their catch.

Mike boated this nice channel cat in addition to several nice crappie. Lesson learned,,the size of the bait fish does matter, get the medium size shiners for the best results.