Lower Bull 4/20,4/22,4/23

[Fish24/7]

wt 63-71

  We pan fished for numbers on 4/20. I was using micro jigs ,power bait and live bait and my friend was using  minnows under a cork..Together we caught just over 200 fish. I caught 170ish, mostly gills. We had several nice keeper crappie ,he caught most of them , but threw a lot of them back. He also caught a 6 lb drum on an ultra light w/ 2lb test! .  My goal was to catch 200 fish by myself but we lost some fishing time because of the rain. Fished bluffs with channel swings in the Theodosia arm in 1-9fow.

 Friday morning I was solo and went out pretty early. Fished about 3 1/2 hours. Found a decent lm bass bite with crankbaits. All keepers in the 3lb range. Found them in 2 places suspended around shad at creek mouths near the channel at 8-15' over 30-45. Bite was good for a  little bit but by mid morning they seemed to be full so I called it a day and went morel hunting. 

 Hit the lake around 2:00 on Saturday with another buddy. He put me on some really nice smallies fishing steep banks in the coves with grubs. Boat sitting about 2 casts offshore in 50+ with bites coming about half way back to the boat.  I had a few keepers on a wacky worm too. Lots of shad around us. He caught a 5' long gar with the grub on 4lb test! Fight lasted 25 minutes and I got some of that on video when the gar jumped like a tarpon! Around 5:00 we went looking for some largemouth. I wanted to flip :(, but he wanted to topwater, so he ran to the backs of some creeks in shin deep water and found some bass chasing shad. Small poppers and walkers in the 2-3" range worked pretty good. Mostly short fish but there were a few post spawn lm in the 2lb range mixed in with them. Put the boat back on the trailer around 7.

[Bluff-Bassin]

The big gills are definitely up. We caught a dozens the size of your hand flipping for bass with jigs and soft plastics. I'm sure guys targeting them with smaller lures could really smoke em in the bushes now.