The parking lot on Snow Hill Rd at Old Oxford Rd was about half full - probably 5-6 cars there when I arrived toward the end of lunchtime. 4 people fishing on the shoreline when I started but after about 20 mins of inactivity, I had the place to myself...
Here are some shots of the upstream end of the pool:
And here's the view to the Old Oxford Rd bridge:
The highlight catch for today was this pretty little x-rap that I snagged and retrieved with my dirty old Rooster Tail after about 20 minutes of fishing.
I quickly swapped lures and went to work with the x-rap. It took about 20 more minutes, and I had almost given up and headed for home, but in the past I've found the whites to come in waves - a long drought with no bites, then a quick burst of fish on every cast. I suspect they're moving around in schools. So I gave it one more trip down to the bridge and it paid off. The bigger one was about 12 inches and had enough broadside to remind me how fun it is to catch these guys in the moving water:
The good:
Not the greatest day of catching, but I came, I saw, and I caught. I even had my mitts on a sweet little freebie x-rap, until I got it hung back up in a gob of collected lures & line out in the middle that overcame my 15lb braid. Easy come, easy go...
The bad:
The way shore fishing hot spots look after a couple of weeks of activity. Pretty disgusting. New slogan: "Take a back-hoe to the spot"
The Ugly:
A long gill net had been stretched through there, but was all caught up in debris down at the bridge. Many dead catfish and a handful of whites were visible in the piles of netting. While I was there, an angler who had visited yesterday came out today with waders and was able to release one live fish and make sure the net wasn't still seining the current. He had called the warden, but none showed while I was there. It appeared that the net has been there a while.
See [
page 3] for The rest of the story from the following day...
The Running of the Whites!
04-15-2009 05:33 PM
