Tuesday, January 8, Lake Okeechobee
Dan writes:
Another cold morning, and since my tournament is not for another two weeks,
I am in no hurry to jump out of the warm tent and into the frosty outside air. By noontime though the wind had laid down, the sun was strong, and the thermometer read 53 degrees, so I headed out for a few hours.
This time I went over to the west side, and into Moonshine Bay. Huge disappointment. So different that I did not recognize it at all. All of the grass (needle-grass I call it) was dead, and other vegetation types have taken over. No clear water to be found at all. In past years you could always count on clear water in here.
I exited Moonshine at the far end and headed across Fisheating Bay to the “North Shore”. Here I experienced my second disappointment of the day. All of the GPS waypoints I had saved from previous years, which marked specific spots in the huge expanses of eelgrass, are going to be useless now that the lake has changed.
Also, all of the water out here today was dirty, a result of the wind. This is something the fish on Lake Okeechobee really don’t like, so I wandered around back behind the reed lines for the rest of the day looking for something different.
Annie writes:
It was freezing this morning and the wind was howling, thank goodness Dan was not planning on going out. We did things around the campsite, worked on email, and then the weather started getting nicer. At 12:30 Dan decided to go out for a few hours. I went into town to run errands. We met at the launch ramp at 5:30, drove back to the campsite, ate dinner and got ready for tomorrow’s big fishing day. After one more cold night tonight the weather should be nicer for us soon.