This post could/should be in the fishing reports section or maybe in the warm water area. Anyway I put it here.

I don?t fish lakes much, maybe 3 or 4 times a year. When I do fish lakes I go after rainbows because that is what they plant in the lakes and they are easy to catch. Anyway to get to the point of this post a week ago I went to one of the local put & take lakes to get a few tugs on my 4 weight.

Most that fish this lake troll flies or spinners and there are those that drown power bait. I prefer to cast and strip. I guess I think it is more like real fishing. I am not a great lake fisherman probably because I only do it a few times a year but I have found that early in the year a wooly bugger or carey special thrown towards the reeds and lilies then stripped will catch a few trout. I was doing just that when something different happened. I always seem to catch one or two small bass at this lake when I fish for trouts. This time I hooked a big bass. Maybe 2 lbs. Ok, so you bass fishing folks might not think this is a very big fish but for me it was.

Hooking and landing a 2 pound or so bass on my 4 weight was kind of fun so I wondered if I could repeat this. I began to fish the reeds and lily pads a little more deeply. I started hooking more bass. Most were of the smaller variety but I was starting to learn where the bass would be and how to catch them. I was getting to the point I could read the shore line and know if it held bass or not. I could also tell by the way the fish took the fly if it was a bass or a rainbow. A new challenge was being met. I love a challenge. I think I may have caught 10 or so more bass that morning but could not repeat the 2 pounder.

Yesterday with some new flies (flies with weed guards, I lost a few on submerged logs and weeds) and my newly acquired knowledge I headed back to the same lake to try my luck again. I started fishing the weed beds and submerged logs and stuff like that. I don?t know if my timing was right or I am just lucky or perhaps I had really learned something about bass fishing but I was able to catch another 2 pounder and even a few a little bigger. I may be hooked on bass. I never fished for bass before and never understood all the attention given to this fish. I now understand some of it. Maybe not the big tournaments and stuff but at least some of the bass fishing fanaticism. While others were catching concrete pond raised cookie cutter trout I was catching locally raised wild bass. One or two over 3 pounds. Still maybe not big by some standards but again for me and my 4 weight they were big enough.