Fished the main lake at Cda yesterday with the wife. Man can those pleasure boaters turn a big lake into a toilet bowl in a hurry. For some reason the folks in the wake board boats like to come in for a close look at fishermen. Yesterday a boat load of fun lovers decided to drag their tuber within about 75 feet of us in
squaw bay at "Full Plow". My skeeter does a great job if fending off big waves but when one of those boats does it's thing they can trow out a 4 foot wave. This one came over the bow, drenched the front deck of my boat and added a few ounces of lake water to my can of pop. I'm sure they heard my verbal assault on them but they were too busy to reply or come back and discuss the matter.

Back to the fishing report.
I managed to release 4 pike on the day. Biggest was only 27" but put up a nice fight.
The "Story of the day" was almost a great success story.
I had 2 Real big pike follow my offering back to the boat within about 5 casts of each other. I beat the area up for about 10 minutes but couldn't get either one to bite. I moved on and fished for about an hour before going back to see if I could hook up on one or both of them. I made a LONG cast over the area where I had seen them. WHAMMO fish on! The hook set was furious and set the hook DEEP. However, after a couple of good head shakes the line broke. More on that later. Frustrated, I retied to another leader and made another cast. I looked down and noticed I was down to the monofilament backing I put on prior to the braided line. The cast I broke off on was very long and when the line snapped, I knew there was a good 50 feet or so of line trailing behind that fish. I changed rods and went back to fishing the area. As I was looking down in about 7 feet of very clear water I could see a bright charturese spot at or near the bottom of the lake. I thought, hey theres my spinner bait. I know there's a big chunk of line behind it. I'll hook the line with another bait and get my spinner bait back. I could not see the fish do to it's quite camoflauge coloring but the bait was still in it's mouth. I managed to hook the line with another bait and pull it to the boat. As I was pulling it to the boat, I could feel the line tugging back. I pulled it in fast enough to get ahold of the original line. Like I said earlier, this was "Almost" a great success story. I got a good hold on the line and felt the fish give a very hard pull. I knew it was a big fish and had wondered if I would be able to hand line it in if I had the chance. We will never know how that would have worked out because as soon as I started to feel the sting of the braided line going through my fingers, guess what??????
The line broke again!!! Looking back on this I believe the last time I replaced the line on my rods was about 2 years ago. I normally do it every year but I thought the lines all looked to be in good shape this year so I thought I would save a buck or 2, or 100 and not replace them this time. BAD mistake!! Guess what I will be doing this weekend. Yep, stringing all of my rods with NEW braided line. Yep, he big one got away again. But at least I know where a couple of big ones are for the next trip.
Fish were caught on spinner baits and soft plastic frogs in 5 to 8 feet of water. Water temps were as warm as 75 degrees in the main lake bays.

---