Watkins Mill State Park

If you read yesterday's post, you know that I went fishing last Saturday and the results were a little disheartening.  What you also need to know is that I am a pretty competitive person by nature.  When I was in high school, basketball was my competitive outlet.  In college, I was in a fraternity and there were competitions around ever corner it seemed like.  After graduating from college, I returned to fishing after a long hiatus and adopted it as my avenue for competition.  While I was glad that my buddy Mark caught his first couple of fish on a fly rod on Saturday, there was a bad taste in my mouth in terms of not being able to get fish to bite for whatever reason.  In short, I felt like a loser and to say that I don't like to lose is an understatement.  I've never been one to sit around and mope about a loss and have been taught to pick myself back up and get back in the game.  So yeah, I went fishing on Sunday.

My girlfriend Wendy and I decided to hit Watkins Mill State Park and to fish the 100 acre lake in the park.  The lake is home to largemough bass, white crappie, channel catfish, redear sunfish, bluegill, and hybrid striped bass.  I haven't heard much about folks catching hybrids out there so we decided to go after bass, crappie, redear, and bluegill.  Don't get me wrong, we were constantly on the lookout for shad busting the surface.  However, we chose to target submerged timber, grass edges, and spots that were shaded.  Let's just say that Sunday proved to be productive that Saturday.

We probably ended up putting 60 fish in the boat total (and released them all).  Now don't get me wrong, there were a lot of dinks, but there were some nice ones as well.  We caught crappie, bass, bluegill, green sunfish, and redear.  I'm not sure how many redear we caught, but I can unequivocally tell you that I have never caught so many redear on a single day in all my life.  We were fishing small, bright colored jigs under indicators so picking up some small fish was expected.  On the other hand, I have seen this method catch four and a half pound bass, big carp (oh yeah, there are HUGE grass carp at Watkins Mill), as well as nice catfish and big bluegill.  The crappie were small and some bluegill were little but we caught some 6-7 inch male bluegill, some redear that were a legit 9 inches, and a bass that pushed 13 inches.  Another positive was that Wendy caught more fish on a fly than she ever had.  Her old record was 2 fish and I'm pretty sure she beat that by at least 20 fish.  We came off the water at about 5 and I felt like I had shaken off the beat-down that I incurred the day before.