Well, tonights excursion started as most of my trips do, spontaneously! Finally had a night with my wife all to myself as our daughter was at a sleep over, and she wanted to go fishing (exactly why I married her), problem was she didn't decide that until about 5:30pm! So after gathering gear, loading the boat, and dashing to the lake, we only had about 4 hours until dark to fish. Not a big deal, hopefully we could get on some smallmouth action??

Started out in the nw corner throwing spinnerbaits and grubs, after about 100 yards of that I switched over to a crawdad colored crankbait and tried fishing it shallow banging the rocks that didn't produce either. It was kinda windy so I decided we would run over to one of the coves and fish the windy side for a whlie. Started casting to docks with spinnerbaits hoping to encounter some baitfish, but nada. We got into a deeper section, (boat in 15') and I finally got a strike on a slow spinnerbait retrieve, just stuck him for a second and he came off. I figured I was at about 5-6 feet deep when he hit, so I switched back to the crankbait and as it shallowed back out, I kept the boat out in about 15' and casted towards shore working a crank along ticking small patches of grass in about 8' of water. Boom!! Hooked into a solid smallie!! Fish ran and ran, I never got her close to the boat and she came off! Continued that technique and about 10 casts later BAM, had another, this one came up, jumped clean out of the water and also spit my crank!! It was a largemouth in the 5lb range...

My wife was getting a bit cold by this time and we could see the rain clouds coming in from the west, so I moved back over to the west side to get her out of the wind. I was fishing directly across from the boat launch and tagged another one on the same pattern, got this smallie to the boat twice and on a run under the boat THAT one came unhooked too!! SOOO, out came the hook sharpener as I was determined not to have that happen anymore.....five casts later I caught the little guy in the pic, but he got the skunk off me at least:)

Wish I would have had more time to explore a tad deeper, especially with the largemouth holding out there too, could have been interesting, but at about 9pm my wife was cold and it was time to get her to shore. I may go back Saturday, but Samish is calling my name still????

Best of luck out there, and if you get 'buzzed' by any ski boats just cast your crankbait at them....it worked for me!!

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