February 20, Pre-Practice Lake Ouachita, Arkansas
Annie writes:
We had a pile of laundry, so I went with Dan this morning to launch him, which left me with the truck for the day. I found a Laundromat about thirty miles away. When I returned to the campground I started getting the tent organized to pack up tomorrow. We have a pretty good system when we travel. We carry about ten big plastic storage boxes, and each one is labeled, for example: tools, electrical, bedding, dry food, kitchen, coffee, Annie clothes, and Dan clothes. This system works pretty well as long as you keep it organized, and the boxes make for easy stacking in the back of the truck.
Dan writes:
Today I covered the entire northern side of the lake, from mid-lake down to the dam. It is all very similar – no straight shoreline anywhere – all points and pockets and islands. I had expected to find the banks becoming steeper and more rocky the further down towards the dam I got, but that is not the case here.
Anyway after the stormy weather we had yesterday, today we had high pressure with a bright blue sky and not a cloud in sight. Typical post-frontal conditions, and the fish reacted predictably. I caught a few twelve-inch fish on a jerkbait, and a couple of bigger ones fishing a jig on the bluffs, but all were largemouth and under sixteen inches. No good. I was able to see a few good fish back up in the clear pockets, but they were not aggressive like they had been before the front, and I could not make any of them bite. I am going to have to slow down and back out to deeper water in order to catch these fish now. The trouble is, I haven’t figured out how to fish slowly with all this grass.