Wednesday, January 9, Lake Okeechobee
Dan writes:
Annie and I waited for the weather to warm up some, then put the boat in over at Harney Pond Canal on the west side. I wanted to spend some time on the North Shore again, to see if I could find some clear water out there on the eel grass flats.
There is an EverStart tournament here this week, and it started today. Boats were congregating in specific areas on the flats, so I joined a couple of groups, fished a crankbait to be different from everyone else, but really just wanted to see if anyone was catching fish. I counted over fifty boats, and in the hour or so that I spent among them, not one guy set the hook on a bite. The water is still dirty everywhere, which I’m sure is not helping.
I left and started looking around again on my own. I ran through Moonshine Bay for the second time, this time from a different angle, but it looks worse than it did yesterday. Dead, dry, and dirty.
As I have for the past two days, I spent a great deal of time today just running the boat around, looking at the water. I have eliminateda lot of areas during this time, but have identified two so far that have what I’m looking for: clear water, hard bottom, and the right kind of vegetation. We quit at 2pm, and drove up to watch the EverStart weigh-in at the north end of the lake.
I haven’t spent a lot of time fishing in the past three days, but in the time I have spent, I have not caught a single fish. The results of the weigh-in today ran along those same lines. Out of 330 anglers in the tournament, only 123 caught any fish at all, and only 207 fish were caught total! This is terrible!
Most guys are blaming it on the cold weather. We’ve had frost in the boat every single morning since we arrived. They say fishing was great three weeks ago, when the water temperature was 80 degrees, but this morning it was down to 50.
Annie writes:
Spent the day in the boat with Dan, mainly just checking things out. The EverStart tournament started today and we did not want to interfere with their fishing. We stopped by the weigh-in to see the weights, and it was nice to see lots of our friends again. We socialized, stayed for the Christian Anglers meeting, then began to head home. Our ride was about an hour and it was already dark, so we figured it would be easier to stop and get a bite to eat while we were out than cook in the dark when we got home.