Boat Trip of Firsts

Having the same day off (which can be a rarity), my friend Matt invited myself and my other fishing buddy Steve down to Angostura Reservoir for a morning of on-water entertainment.....hopefully. While it wasn't my first open-water trip of the season, it was my first trip to Angostura for the year and it had been good to us last season so I was confident we'd catch something.

For my buddy Steve, it would be his first time fishing from a boat ever and his first time going after walleyes as well. I hoped he would catch his first eyes and scratch that species off his list.

As we reached our first destination, they trolled jigs with minnows on them, while I wanted to try out some new plastics that I'd bought specifically for this reason. I tied on the new Northland Impulse Core swimbait as well as the Impulse grub plastic on another using Northland Thumper jigs as well as new 8 My Bait jigs.

The walleyes were heavily feeding on shad in the lake from the fishing reports I'd read, so I decided it was best to try and "match the hatch" as they say. I put on shad and shiner colored ones and jigged them along as we trolled around rocky points and weedy bottoms, targeting 9' to 16' depths.

No one caught anything at one of the better spots, so we moved along the dam, targeting the same depths. Matt managed to hook a couple of nice smallmouths, but no walleyes. We headed back to the first spot for one more try before we'd head further south and target some bays for bass.

Steve managed to hook up with two walleyes, which made me ecstatic for him as they were his first walleyes ever. They were the only bites along that stretch so south we went.

We trolled along one of the bays slowly and pitched our jigs out along the dock and around weeds. Matt managed another smallmouth and a northern, but nothing for me or Steve.

As we rounded a small protruding point further back, I cast out the rig and no sooner had I reeled a few feet in, then wham! A huge hit and the fight was on. One good size largemouth later and I was finally on the board and that would be the last fish we caught all morning.

While it was a bit slower than normal, at least, we all caught fish and Steve scratched walleye off his catch list. Warm weather coming up should jump start the bite finally as the cold, rainy weather has been keeping things quiet around the Hills. I'm looking forward to hitting some lakes in the near future in the pontoon and seeing what's below.