Just a couple of things to cover before we get started with the fishing:

I’ve been thinking about starting a podcast for a while and I think we may pull the trigger on it soon. My neighbor has a podcast for his business asked me if I had thought about it for my fishing and offered to help. I think it would be great to have it in the Cast Away man cave and cover more topics than just fishing. I’d like to talk about a variety of topics, including hunting, fishing, sports in general, outdoor type activities as well as military topics and guests to tell their story. I’d like to invite different guests every week, whether it’s bass and striper fishing guides to promote their business or just folks that I find interesting and want to chat with. I’m open to ideas and suggestions to get it off the ground and I’d like to hear what you think…..

Secondly, chigger has been taken off the “seriously ill” home hospice list. He tried to bite Lisa and myself a couple days ago which means he’s back to normal. He’s barking at squirrels and turkey buzzards again and he’s eating well, so I think he’ll be around a bit longer.

Now to the fishing:

Speaking of seriously ill, topwater is on life support right now. Don’t get me wrong, you can still catch them on top, especially early or if you can find them schooling but I can definitely tell it’s slowing down considerably, and my friend Mike told me that a lot of the fish he’s seeing on Panoptics are coming up to about 5 feet below the surface before going back down when they see a topwater bait. That tells me that there isn’t good oxygen at the surface which means that if the fish do come to the surface they won’t stay there long. My friend Mitch Harper told me that the 3 second rule was in effect. If you can’t make a cast to a surfacing fish within 3 seconds of him going back down, he ain’t coming back up. Today it was more like 1 second but who’s counting. That’s where the Stealth stuff comes in.

Just after I retired from the Navy, Lockheed Aeronautics contacted me and ask if I would be interest in working on their F-22 stealth program. That was back when stealth was becoming a thing and I knew very little about stealth because there were no Navy aircraft with stealth capability. I agreed to go to work for Lockheed and I learned a lot about stealth and the need for it. There is a lot to be said for the element of surprise and being stealthy provides just that. This week I left the topwater on the deck for the most part and chose to sneak up on the brush and start out with the spybait all stealthy like. I found that if I approached the brush throwing topwater, the fish more than likely were not going to come up but what throwing the topwater did do was scatter the fish. The more I threw the topwater, the more the fish would scatter. It was like when the Army Air Cav blasted music approaching an area for attack. Blasting music from the choppers confused and scared the hell out of the enemy before they scattered into the trees. That’s what topwater is doing right now, for the most part it’s scaring the hell out of the bass, and they are scattered for the trees. For that reason, I have chosen the stealth approach and kept it quiet with the spybait and then after moving around the brush casting the spybait, I’m moving in with the drop shot. If I used this method this week, I caught more fish than if I started with topwater.

My week started on Sunday afternoon out at Man Pond. We caught some very nice largemouth including my buddy Will with a nice 7.5 on an ole monster. Here’s a pic.

Man Pond never disappoints, and I had a few nice ones myself but nothing like the 7.5. On Monday the 4th of July, Lisa and I got out on an early morning spybait/drop shot trip before the crowds got out and we caught some nice ones. Lisa and I were using the very same spybait, ghost minnow, but she caught 5 spybait fish from the back of the boat with me zeroing from the front on the same exact Spybait. Go figure.

Here’s a few pictures of our biggest from our trip on Monday including Lisa’s 4lber.

I really didn’t do much fishing until yesterday when I took my neighbor and his friend out. We just threw around the spybait and we caught 8 pretty nice fish for the morning, all on spybait. The bite died about 10;30-11:00 and we called it quits shortly thereafter. We had some great fellowship and talked about our faith in the Lord. David and Keith are great mentors when it comes to faith. Here’s a picture of one of my guests, Keith, a retired dentist and avid surfer as well as a few other sports. He’s still going strong, and I want to be as active as Keith when I hit 72.

Today I got out early in the morning, just after sunrise by myself for a little spybait and drop shot action. I caught fish on both and made a little video with a few fish and a quick report to end my week. Water temps are hoovering in the upper 80″ and the corps is generating during peak power usage and into the night right now. The lake level is a foot below full pool. Have a safe weekend. Here’s the video from today.