The Most Epic Morning I Have Ever Had AT Watkins Mill State Park

First of all, happy belated Father's Day to all of you dads out there!  Hopefully everyone was able to spend some time with friends and family yesterday and have some fun along the way.  I had a wonderful day and it started at about 7:00 AM at Watkins Mill State Park.  I have fished this lake for a few years now and while I have had some good days on the water, nothing compares to what happened yesterday.

My idea for the morning was to hit the eastern side of the lake pretty hard because that's where the shade was going to be.  It has bee really hot here over the last couple of weeks and I was guessing that the fish would be looking for shade and slightly lower water temps but still feeding at the same time.  When I reached the eastern bank, I found some shad breaking the surface so I started casting around them with the hope that something was chasing them to the surface.  It didn't take long to surmise that the shad were just acting like shad and not being pursued by predators.  I also made a few casts at a four foot long grass carp that had a tail the size of my head.  As usual, that was an unsuccessful pursuit.

From there, I focused on my game plan of hitting the shade.  This instantly became tricky as the shade was only being cast on extremely shallow water that had a lot of vegetation.  I almost jetted over to the other side of the lake to fish structure because of this but I sure am glad that I did not.  Instead, I remembered back to last summer when I fished this same bank one morning.  On that particular morning, I ran my boat parallel to the bank and cast out to the main lake.  I managed to catch a few hybrid striped bass that day so before I abandoned this spot, I decided to give that a try.

While casting out to the main lake didn't produce any strikes, I did find the pattern that would rule the morning.  I ended up casting parallel to the bank but about 10-15 yards off the bank.  I was fishing deeper water with no shade and less vegetation.  I was hoping to lure something out of the depths and thinking that maybe fish would be holding in this spot.  Well they were doing exactly that.  Every fish I caught was doing exactly that!  

I threw a tandem wooly bugger rig with one fly being all white and the other having a white body, olive hackle, and an olive tail.  It was about 50/50 on which one got hit, but they both caught fish.  In terms of fish, here are the stats from my epic morning.  I ended up boating 2 bluegill, 1 redear sunfish, 4 channel cats and about 15 bass!  I have never had a morning like that before because I have NEVER caught that many bass OR catfish in one morning or evening at Watkins Mill.  Now admittedly, none of these fish were what I would call big.  The catfish were between 2-3 pounds and the biggest bass was 13 inches.  However, the sheer number of strikes and the aggressiveness of the takes made the action pretty much nonstop for about 2 hours.  I bet I only missed 3-4 fish total, which was good for me, but the fish helped me out a lot by hitting hard and holding on to the flies.

Yesterday was a lesson learned for me about where and how to fish this lake.  I had never done what I did before on this lake with the technique that I was employing.  What makes yesterday even sweeter was the fact that now I have that information to use in the future along with other things that I already knew about the lake.  I hope that you can use this information too and I hope it gives you even more success than it gave me yesterday!

I thought Waylon was about to have a dust-up with this raccoon that was foraging along the bank.