Sunday, October 08, 2006

Granite Shoals on a full moon

I went fishing with Preast last night at a cove in Granite Shoals about 6 mile west of Marble Falls. It's always a challenge finding the park where we launch.

The cove had about a dozen underwater green lights and the night had a slight breeze but not too bad. The full moon started rising pretty much after sunset. It was a nice night. The bugs were out in force around any light so when I turned on my headlamp to retie a fly, it had to be fairly quick or I'ld have bugs on my glasses.

Once the lights were on for a bit, we could see plenty of baitfish in the water yet not many larger fish. Eventually I found one of the lights had a couple of large carp sipping something off the top; maybe some of the bugs attracted to the lights. They refused my flies and spooked easily.

At that light I finally hooked a decent fish which I think had to have been a white bass, it came unhooked when I put too much pressure on it near the kayak.

Fishing was pretty slow. Not much fish swarming the lights or attacking the baitfish. The full moon lit up the water nicely though. Preast had about the same luck I did and caught a couple of bass that gave themselves away when they passed through the lights.

I found one light that seemed to generate most of my fish for the night and landed a medium size white bass, a couple of small largemouth and some really big bluegills. One of those bluegills was caught on a #2 zonker strip fly which was amazing. It had to have been larger than my hand at about 8 1/2" and fought impressively on the 6wt.

By about 10:30pm it didn't look like the action would pickup so we headed back to the putin and loaded up and left around 11pm. I was a great night to be fishing the lights though some more action would have been nice. I bet in the early spring the place is hopping with white bass so I'll be back then.

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