I was in Orlando Florida for a week doing the Disney World thing. It was my son's make a wish trip. We had a great time and fortunately for me I had time to sneak away for half a day to do some flats fishing. Fishing on the flats is my favorite, I can't get enough of it. On this trip I went to Titusville, and went out in the famous Mosquito lagoon. I must say it was everything that I had seen on TV or read about. What a great place, I want to move to Florida so bad. How great would it be to flats fish all the time.


The top picture is the biggest sea trout I caught that day. I know its not a giant, but it was actually my first ever. The redfish is also my first, a 15lb beautiful specimen.

I threw a fly rod for a little bit, but the cloudy conditions really made fly fishing tuff, which doesn't bother me because lately I am finding more and more situations where fly fishing is not only the least effective method, but its kind of a pain in the ass for various reasons. So most of the day we threw plugs and large live shrimp. I did have some sweet blow ups on top water plugs from redfish. A 15lb redfish will get your heart going a little faster that a 4lb bass.

Was in Idaho last week for work. I ended up have Thursday afternoon off so I wanted to do some fishing. The only river I could find that wasn't blown out and too high was the south fork of the Boise River. So I went down there to check it out and see if I could catch anything. Unfortunately I did not do my homework first, so I had no idea what to through as far as fly selection. There was a caddis hatch, but I had no luck with that. So after about an hour I decided to through streamers, good thing too because I ended up catching this beautiful rainbow. I had to fish a full sinking line to get the fly down deep enough. My fly of choice was an olive circus peanut. I actually had never caught anything on the circus peanut before, but I had not fished it that much either. So I sold out and fished it. Well needless to say I am sold. Great fly and I had a great time fishing. And I think I am probably turned into an exclusive streamer guy for trout, well maybe I will occasionally nymph.

Eagle Valley Reservoir Nevada

Had a great trip to Eagle Valley Reservoir in mid June. I took my boys camping up there, Jared loves to catch trout and Kellen just loves camping, fishing and being outside. This was Kellen's first camping trip that he has been on since he was 1 1/2.

Water conditions were good. The water was cool, and the weeds were still pretty thin around the shore line. Weeds are good and bad, good because they attract fish and food, bad because it makes fishing from shore difficult. But in this case the water was fairly clear and very fish able. the weather was outstanding. Warm during the day about 80 and high 40s at night.

Now to the fishing. Most shore anglers were chucking bait of some kind, marsh mellows seemed to be the popular choice. And alot of fish were being caught. I personally don't like bait chucking, its boring, plus i wanted to try a new technique I read about, using jerk baits. So I rigged up two rapala x-rap's in the 3 inch model and olive/silver color scheme. And it worked, very well. We caught about 30 trout total in two days of fishing, some big and some small. We just cruised the shoreline and made casts to shore and parallel to the shore, just as if you are bass fishing with a jerk bait. The hits were very aggressive, and most trout stayed hooked after the hit! When the wind would calm down I would pull out the fly rod. Caught some nice trout on olive/white clouser and clouser half and half minnows. However these were not standard clousers. I tie my flies with synthetic hair instead of buck tail, it provides a more translucent look under water. I did ok with the fly rod, but it was so windy most of the time casting was very difficult. At certain times during the day even fishing with a spinning rod was hard due to the wind.

All in all it was a great trip. I wanted to experiment with jerk baits for trout and I got to. It is basically bass fishing for trout and is not only very effective for larger fish, but is fun. But most importantly its easy, my 9 year old son had the technique down after about 10 casts.

Lake Mead Largemouth

Went to Lake Mead last weekend. I heard the bass were up on beds, but I didn't find any. The water was very clear, so I didn't see alot of bass action, or milling around. But with the water that clear its hard to tell, because I could have been scaring them or else they were deep out of eye site. Either way I only caught one bass, the one in the photo. Caught it on a Rapala X-shad rap(light blue back). Tossed a few different lures this day, jigs, crank baits, scrounger head jigs and some jerk baits. The crank baits and jerk baits where the only thing I got any attention from the bass with. Water temp was 58 degrees, and air temps were around 70 but it was a bright blue bird day so fishing was tough.

Southern Nevada Pond Largemouth

Went to Floyd Lamb Park today. It was really windy and cloudy. It was hot out, so the clouds were a welcome, but the wind can go away! The wind was blowing so bad it was almost impossible to cast a fly rod. I have been hitting up the pond all winter experimenting with different fly patterns with no luck. I was not even really seeing any bass activity. But we have been having very warm days and warm nights this week, so I figured the bass would be active. I guessed right. Unfortunately there were so many people at the park it was impossible to fish it correctly, just all the activity made for poor fishing. But I did manage to get into one, and get a few other strikes. I was bouncing a green pumpkin jig with a green pumpkin trailer off the bottom and around stumps. I got a few strikes with this method. But I did notice a small bass chase my jig to the surface when I pulled it in. That gave me and idea to try and swim the jig around the shoreline. That was the ticket. After about the third cast swimming the jig I got bit and landed the bass in the picture, well I hooked it and let the little guy reel it in.

Went up to Cold Creek pond today. There was no snow at the pond itself, but plenty of snow on the mountain. In the picture, my son Kellen is playing in the snow. The pond's water level was full and really dirty. There were a few other people there fishing, but I didn't see any fish caught. I did see one fish rise. My kids threw a gold kast-master and I threw a couple different nymphs and an olive and a purple woolly worm, as well as the kast-master. But we didn't catch any fish this trip, not even any strikes, which is really strange for that place. Usually you can't make a cast without at least a small nibble. I think I might go to Lake Mead later in the week and try to catch one of the big stripers that are chasing the stocker trout around.

December Stripers

December was a pretty good month for stripers at Lake Mead. I got down to the lake about four times. I didn't really know how good the fishing would be, and my son wanted to go and is not really into going in the kayak in the dead of winter, so we bank fished. We did pretty good. Caught fish three out of the four trips. No more than 5 fish in any particular trip, but not bad for a few hours fishing. I got kinda lucky, I went down to Hemingway harbor where the hatchery trout are dumped in the lake. I was going to throw big trout swim baits in hope of getting a big striper. Once I got down to the lake there was like I expected, alot of people bank fishing. But to my amazement they weren't fishing for planter trout. They were all striper fishing. There were thousands of shad all balled up against the shore line. Most anglers where netting the shad and using them for bait. The stripers where not far behind the shad. I was using storm swim baits in shad color patterns. You had to be able to cast quite a ways out past the shad bait balls, but that was where the stripers where. On the first day I hooked three in a matter of 20 minutes, which wasn't bad considering that most of the other guys had been there all day using shad and hadn't got a bite. Here is a picture of my son Jared holding a striper he caught.