"Guiding"

Been helping good friends get on fish the last three trips. Took KayakKevin aka DrumJesus aka WhitewaterWhitley aka Kevin Whitley to one of my favorite tidal creeks. Lent him some tackle and he quickly put them to good use. Got his first snakehead, a bunch of bass, and a 30” VA citation bowfin.

Another good friend Michael Beck got him a nice snakehead that he had been after for two years. His first encounter left him with an inverted hollow body frog, water everywhere and a broken rod tip. His stoke was infection.

Lastly, an old buddy Brian Welteroth reminded me it had been 9 years since I took him out on the river so we picked up a few bream and brews and set up above the old catfish hole. Little blue cats gobbled up most of the baits but the last one ended up being a nice 39.5” flathead.

Skinny Sweetwater Sightfishing (Video)

After chasing an open water salt specie for a while, I decided to switch it up and check out some skinny sweetwater areas.

My ninja, Wayne Tu stuck a nice bass on a frog and I managed to sight cast to a decent bowfin.

As fun as it was, I suspect it will be time to go back and play with our bigger brinier friends soon.  Hope to see you all out there.

Skinny Sweetwater Shenanigans

The 2pm kid-duty-switch-off agreement put the kibosh on 

hopes of returning to my salty big water conquests.  

Instead, little creeks became our stadium.  

And we came to play.

By the time the first rays of light pierced through the trees, Jeff Lockhart, Matt Anderson, and I were already well into our first creek.  A few small bass had been hooked and quickly released before finding what we were hoping for.  Snakehead.  

The 22"er struck Jeff's frog imitation in less than a foot of water.  Our expectations of a furiously savage fight as described by others encountering the invasive specie were muted by the fact that it quickly had a huge amount of vegetation around the line and covering it's face.  Regardless, we were ecstatic to confirm our hunch.  The area is not known to hold snakeheads but we thought it was worth a shot.  

As the day went on our search for more only yielded a few suspicious wakes.  However we were still all smiles with the abundance of other life in the area.  The little creeks were holding tons of baitfish and the largemouth bass were waiting around nearly every bend or dip to ambush them.  Weedless, weightless flukes and frogs yielded a little less than a dozen bass with most of them in the 18" range.  Topwater blow ups never get old and it was thoroughly enjoyable to watch bass take the fluke only a few feet from the kayak.  

Matt got into double digits of bass as well on various swimbaits and senkos.  In a larger part of the creek, Jeff landed the biggest bass of the day going a little over 21".  At one point, I kept getting short strikes on the fluke when I finally set the hook into something that surprised us all for this time of year.  The good sized yellow perch made me switch to the smaller set up with a little white grub.  The following 3 casts rendered 3 more perch with the biggest going a bit over 11".  Matt scored one just shy of citation at 11 3/4".  Not too long after that, I lucked out with a new specie checked off my bucket list; bowfin.  It tore up the baby bass fluke and provided a most satisfying fight on relatively light tackle.  Unfortunately, my GoPros turned themselves off due to the heat and the 23"er flopped out of my hands just before Jeff could click the shutter. 

For a relatively short trip, it was really a blast.  Jeff added one more specie for the day with a decent crappie from under a duck blind.  The call of the salt may be strong, but if weather and timing doesn't work out, we'll definitely be up for some more skinny sweetwater shenanigans.