It was kind of a weird evening at the lake just now. Today (Saturday) was a really nice day, so I expected a lot of people to be at the lake this evening. Nope. There were a few families there, but nothing like the crowds that are usually there are on the weekends.
The lake is still a mess. Algae is everwhere. You can see it laying on the bottom. Some of it is attached to the bottom and floats up towards the surface. And some of it is detached and has formed large masses that float near the bank all over the place. It looks like fish poop lining the entire outer edge of the lake.
It's pretty gross when you're stripping algae off your dropshot on every retrieval and as you pinch the algae to remove it from the sinker you inadvertantly crush a bunch of tiny little snails that live inside the algae. You're trying to remove this grotesque mass which looks like something that came out of the Hulk's nose during allergy season, and your finding a bunch of little creatures that you can not identify crawling around (and onto your fingers).
This stuff is everywhere and unavoidable for the most part. I try to avoid the floating masses as I'm reeling my bait in to minimize the cleanup effort.
So, I had been there for only about 15 minutes when I feel a bite. I set the hook and the fish starts swimming around with all the direction and purpose of a confused butterfly. He didn't know where he was going. He didn't come up and do any headshakes and he wasn't really swimming hard, just ... swimming. So I was starting to wonder if I had caught something other than a bass, but eventually he came to the surface and I saw it was a bass.
Now I don't know if he was just having an off day, as was the rest of the lake, but as soon as he saw me he basically just gave up. He swam around a little bit but would then just come up the surface and lie there looking at me. I wanted to play him a bit, so I didn't haul him in right away. But he didn't want to play. He just looked at me as if he knew very well what a fisherman was and that I'd be releasing him soon enough. But I wasn't hauling him in right away. So what did he do? Remember those floating masses of algae I mentioned? He decided he'd go along pulling my line through those, collecting as much of it as he could on my line. That got my attention. I didn't want anything to do with that. I grabbed my net and he came to the surface again and just laid there calm as could be while I netted him. No headshakes, no fighting. Just an attitude of "Get this thing out of my lip and put me back in the water so I can go find some REAL food!!!" Unfortunately, I didn't have my phone with me so I couldn't take a picture of him.
I only stayed for about an hour. I was getting tired of the algae real quick. Then all the swarms of mosquitos came out as the sun was setting. It also started to get cold and I didn't have anything warm, so I decided to call it an evening. 1 Fish. That's all I ever ask.
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