Hit ShelbyvilleThurs. Wind was already up and blowing out of the south when we arrived just before daylight. Wind had been strong for the previous three days and had the water very off color on most of the lake where we were at. Rain started about an hour after we started fishing our second spot. It rained all day, just a mist at times, a strong drizzle most of the time and light to hard showers off and on. Temps were on the cool side but we were comfortable in sweatshirts and light rain gear. Fish were shallow and spawning. Fished some deeper waters but everything we caught was in 4 to 8 ft of water in horizontal logs or lay downs or small but very brushy stick-ups. It took us just under 8 hrs to get our 3 man limit of 45. We threw back quite a few small ones early, several real nice fish later while trying to get our 15 under 10”. We had our limit of over tens before 1:00 pm. The over tens ran from 10 - 13". Took another couple of hrs to pick through fish and get the final three at just under 10 to finish our limit of under tens. We were back at the launch by 3:00 pm. All fish were caught on jigs and plastic tails. Most of the fish were caught tight lining the jigs – vertical jigging in and around cover. A few were caught on jigs and floats but the vertical jigging was working much better. We fished places out of the wind enough that we could hold / position ourselves with the trolling motor, we never anchored. Color or body type didn’t seem to matter to much today. We used solid shad type bodies and tubes, red, orange, & black head 1/8 ounce head jigs, yellow, chartreuse, green, lime green, yellow & white, blue and white and solid blue colored plastics and all seemed to catch equal amounts of fish – nothing seemed to give anyone an edge in size or numbers.
The happiest people don’t necessarily have the best of everything;
they just make the best of everything they have.
