Are My Expectations Just Off? What Is "good" Fishing?

[jimithyashford]

Went out on Saturday for most of the day. Spent about an hour fishing the hole below the Rivercut golf course parking lot. I used a crankbait and a Ned style rig. I didn't actually have any of those stiffer worms that the Ned calls for, so I used brightly colored (since it was overcast) worm rigged the same way. That didn't get me anything, either across the bottom or up higher. So I switched to a very small crankbait and that got me.....a catfish? Very suprised to get a catfish jumping up and catching my crankbait, but he did. That was an average sized channel cat. I was glad to catch him. After that the Golf Course hole gave no more love for about 40 minutes and I called it quits and headed off to the Delaware town access, which I had never fished before.

That place was snag city. I tried putting out a catfish rod with crawfish tails on it while actively bass fishing, but I got snagged every time, so I gave that up. When I was bass fishing I had to stay top water cause anything even kinda low got snagged. I started by fishing off the boat ramp, nothing there. Moved down and fished below the first set of riffles, nothing there either, then I lost my crankbait to a snag. I was very annoyed.

So I switched to something cheap that I didn't care to lose, a little yellow fuzzy jig, and headed off downstream to find a better spot. There is a place wher the main river heads to the right, and to the left is a little soggy stream bed that you can tell only flows when the river is really high, but is cut off from the rest of the river when it's not the rainy season. I went back there and fished my jig in the series of isolated pools on that side and caught loads of little perch, which are fun to catch but not exactly a prized quarry, and I also caught one baby smallie and one larger smallie, probably 10 inches or so, out of one of those isolated pools. Everything in those pools was super hungry.

So, I wouldn't call the trip a wild success, but I did much better than I have yet this year. I caught one decent catfish, one smallie who, while not a monster a least wasn't a baby, and got to jerk about a dozen ravenous perch out of the water.

Also, while exploring the partially dried out bed I found an absoluty mother lode of oyster mushrooms, but they were all babies and need a few balmy days to grow. We are supposed to get a few more nice hot days later in the week, after those days I'm heading back to harvest. If you like wild mushrooms, Oysters are the best, and I am thinking I will walk away with like 10 pounds of them. Hyvee is the only store in town that I know of that sells them, and they charge $8-$9 a pound, so finding a huge wild harvest is a good score. Feel free to take the tip and go get some, but if you take them all and don't leave any for me I will be very disappointed.

[Mitch f]

Careful with the mushroom identification

[jimithyashford]

I may not be much of a fisherman, but I am an old pro at mushrooming.

[Terrierman]

Oysters are my fave too, even ahead of the vaunted morel.