Anthony and Brian

 

      Guide DP took these guys out this morning and this is his rendition of the events of the morning.

We left high point at 4 am in search of bait. By day light we had caught 2 pieces of bait. We went searching for schools of bait but the cloud and fog cover would not let the sun peek through long enough for the bait to gang up. At 730 we had 7 pieces of bait, I wanted to try something so we put out 3 lines baited with really large baits that we had. We made about a hundred yard pull and caught a catfish and a keeper striper. We threw them both back and headed to the marina.  We hung around the marina for 15 minutes or so and while Anthony was grabbing his trolling rigs, Brian said to me "man this morning has really been tough". I could see the disappointment in his face so I was hoping to change that very quickly.  Well, my boat does not like to go slow and after trying to troll at 4.5 mph we got the rigs in and went searching for bait.  We searched for a while and finally found what we were looking for. Anthony was throwing from the front of the boat and I was throwing from the back.  One of my throws hit the middle of the school and that was all that we needed.  As my net was falling another boat that we had seen earlier in the morning (struggling for bait as well) drove by and asked if we had had any luck. Well once we saw that I had landed about 100 baits, Anthony said let's try to stay with this school and help that guy out with some bait. After a couple more throws from Anthony he said let's go give him what extra we have and get out of here. So that's what we did.  We had never seen this gentleman before but we knew that he had struggled like we had and we just wanted to help him out a bit. He really appreciated our generosity towards him, we chatted for a minute and then we parted ways. By now its 9:15 and we search and search for a school of fish. We stopped and looked at a few schools but it was not what we were looking for. Now its 9:45 and knowing that Anthony needed to leave at 10:30 I headed towards a place where I had seen several fish earlier in the morning.  I was a half a mile from where I wanted to go when I ran over what we had been looking for. I turned the boat around, shut off the big motor and starting putting out bait. I was really caught up in the action when Brian said "man, I have never caught my limit in 5 minutes before".  After he said that I looked in the live well and it was full. We took a minute from the action to count the fish and we had 10. So we went back into the school and popped 2 more really quick and had our limit.  Then we cleaned up the boat and emptied the bait tank ( which took about 10 minutes) when we sat down to leave my Lowrance was still full of fish.  This was the largest school of fish that I have been on this summer and they were mostly all keepers, we only had 2 fish that were under the 20" mark. Today's bait collection was tough but we never gave up, we hung in there and gave it our all and it really paid off. I hope the gentleman that we helped out with bait had a successful day as well.