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.