Fishing at Lake Pleasant  -  Jun 5th, 2008 11:47pm

Its been the best part of a year since I've fished at lake Pleasant.  The lake has changed a lot in that time.  They have extended the southern docks, the water is about 20ft higher, and there is this strange mossy junk covering shallow structures and plants in the lake.

When we fish Lake Pleasant, what we usually do is try one thing for a while.  If it works great, if not then we move on and try a different location/lure/bait/whatever.  Usually we find something that works but not always.  So that was the plan when I met my father at the southern launch late Friday afternoon and we headed out to try the shallow waters of Humbug Creek.

We went about 3/4 the way up that arm of the lake and stopped to fish along the canyon walls.  We threw some rubber worms and running lures but the bass just weren't there.  What was there though were thousands of carp schooling at the surface, slurping crud, and jumping like mad.  We tried to get them to bite but weren't really prepared to carp fish so we went further up the lake and set up for the night.

Unfortunately, night fishing wasn't much better.  We tried minnows, worms, chovies - it didn't matter.  Nothing was biting so we tried moving back down the lake a bit but only got a bite or two.  It was a beautiful evening though and if your not catching fish you might as well get some sleep so we put out the polls and tried to catch some z's.

As usual, trying to sleep is an almost guaranteed way to catch fish.  My dad was first - for about the third time in as many years a fish yanked his pole right out of the boat.  Amazingly, he was able to snag his pole, fish and all with another line he had out before it hit bottom.  The pendulum swung back and normalcy was achieved though when he got hung up on the anchor line and lost the fish after all.  In fact, the only fish we caught that night was a small striper that woke me up after our anchor lost grip and we drifted out into the lake.

Fortunately our decision the next morning to fish islands off of the main lake paid off.  It took a while as we tried different things - running lures, jugs, worms, chovies.  Eventually, floating a live minnow while we slowly drifted caught some fish.  I landed a decent striper and we boated some decent largemouth.  As usual, my father lost a real monster right near the boat and shortly after that we bailed before it got to hot.  All in all a good trip, just proves that you can find fish if you just keep after it.