LAKE/LOCATION: Lake Okeechobee (out of Clewiston)
WATER TEMP: 75-80
WATER COLOR & VISIBILITY: clean deep in the grass, however the mud is starting to bleed through in areas due to wind, the rim canal is still fairly muddy
WEATHER: post frontal, cool in the morning (mid 60’s) warming to the low 80’s, clear skies, and winds up to 20 NE
ESTIMATED CALENDER PERIOD: fall, pre-spawn
FISH BEHAVIOR: Yeah, that front went through. The fishing slowed way down. I may not have caught anything decent yesterday however I got a ton of bites. Today, the fish stayed small and bites were tough to come by. Right away in the morning I tried to beat the wind and run to that little area outside Uncle Joe’s Cut. I got there and the wind had already picked up but I was able to fish it fairly thoroughly. Tossed a Gambler Big EZ to all the same places I did yesterday and ended up with one bite I wasn’t even able to hook.
Left and ran down south to fish that flat I pushed into yesterday. Same result. Flipped some little mats at the entrance and took a 2.5lbs fish from an isolated mat of Penny Wort but then zeroed tossing swim jigs and the Big EZ on the flat. The only bites I got on the flat came from a couple of the little bedding “holes” I found tossing a weightless straight tail worm. Yet, they were all small fish. The water in there had become a bit muddier and the wind was a bit stronger than yesterday.
I spent too much time in there playing with dinks and moved out to flip a bit more in the cut that runs on the inside of the rim canal focusing on the line of Penny Wort – caught some small fish mostly holding the bait against the top of the matt (which has become a fairly consistent bite of late) but no decent bites.
I ran a bunch of new water at that point and tossed some baits but everything, although it’s opened up quite a bit due to spraying and the hydrilla dying back, seems too shallow or just doesn’t look right. Hit a schoolie shoal briefly and saw a guide pulling a ton of dinks and a couple 2-3lbs fish around the corner from the shoal on shiners; but I didn’t even see suspended fish on my graph on the shoal.
I closed up the day hitting a little opening of hyacinth mats stuck in some cane I stumbled on late in the summer when I first came down. I had never taken a fish out of there but it looks good with 4-5’ of water under the isolated mats and a bit of stain in the water. I ended up taking a 4.5lbs fish pumping the bait under some dying hyacinth and then 2 dinks off another matt. I flipped quite a few mats in between but it seemed like there were a couple choice mats that held a few fish and that was it.
Overall it was slow, but frankly I was expecting that due to my experience during the past few fronts that have gone thru. A tried and true bite when this does happen though seems to be flipping mats and and holding the bait agains the “ceiling” of the mat and just waiting for a bite.
Fish the 352 