Rob And Eric Ciccone with Larry Dickey

February 19th, 2010: Sunny and Breezy, Water Temp 38* midlake and 48* at the dam.
Caught bait early and was ready to go before daylight when I got a call from Rob, seems Eric may have given him wrong directions this morning [yea right] and they ended up in Ladysmith , needless to say we were a little late getting started this morning. We set up pulling a dozen planner boards, a bobber and a couple downlines over flats. I had no sooner put the first bait out on a bobber before it got hit, I looked at the depth finder and it was full of arches. I got the spread out and we popped 3 fish real quick then the fish shut down, we worked the area for a half hour with only a couple short hit so I moved on to a ledge I knew held fish. We hit it twice and caught 4 punks so I decided to do something different. I had been noticing fish hugging the bottom over deeper flats, that plus the board bite diminishing encouraged me to put some baits right in the Stripers face to see if they would eat. We started to convert to downlines, I wanted to put 8 down but by the time we got three down they started going off. For about an hour we tried to get all the lines wet but it was a struggle. I finally figured out that once a fish hit the deck Larry and Rob should take the fish off the hook, Eric was good with putting the bait out and soon we were operating like a well oiled machine, the fish didn't stand a chance now. We spanked the school, kept 16 fish to take home, released some to fight again and were back at the marina before lunch time, a great day out on the lake and a lot of fun for everyone.
PS...Eric was too sick today to go to school today so his father brought him along, a couple of times I looked at Eric and he had the shivers. He hated to miss school but he got quite an education today, I think he may have learned a few new words from his daddy this morning when they realized they were lost.