Time: 6:00 PM - 9:30 PM
Air Temperature: 74-84 Degrees
Water Temperature: 83-85 Degrees
Lake Level: 555.96'
Weather Conditions: Calm early, but turning very choppy. Winds from the South.
I got up this morning with the main intent to try to recover my jugs that I left floating overnight. I launched from the house and headed over to where I originally launched the jugs last night. I knew they drifted, but figured I'd start there. I had studied the wind and current last night and found there was little to no significant current. The main mechanism for movement would the the wind blowing from the south, south east. I expected the jugs to be drifting north to north west.
There were no jugs where I launched them, as expected. I turned on the Navionics app and set it to track my course and I began to ride in a grid-like approach beginning on the north shore in case any had washed ashore. They had not. I continued to ride back and forth from the south bank to the north bank, traversing a little farther west each time. Once I approached the islands where the power lines cross, I checked the south bank of each island to see if they had washed ashore. I spotted the first jug just off the east point of the southernmost power line island. I dropped a pin in the app to begin plotting a drift pattern. This first jug was one of the ones with the monofilament leaders and had a channel cat on it.
I quickly picked up several more jugs within eye sight and plotted each one with a pin. I quickly began to see the drift pattern being plotted and headed along that course and spotted more jugs. I pick 11/12 up pretty quickly. The last one was not anywhere to be seen, so I figured either a barge pulled it away, someone picked it up, it broke loose, or a fish pulled it away from the others. I began making parallel runs along each side of the drift pattern. On my final pass, I was going to head back towards the nuclear plant. Along the way, I spotted and picked up the final jug, which had a channel cat on it, too.
I was VERY happy to have recovered all the jugs. Navionics said I covered 25 miles in 1.75 hours during my attempt to round them up. In the end, they had floated 3.5 miles over night. The results of the monafilament vs. nylon experiment was interesting. Of the 6 with monafilament, I caught fish on two jugs and a third showed one had been on, but had thrown the hook. I had zero bites on the nylon. I will be changing the others over to monofilament.
It was only about 8 AM and the weather was nice. I had about 4 shad or 16 pieces of bait remaining from my trip last night, so I decided to bounce bottom with my new rig over in my normal spot at the nuclear plant.
The action was as hot as it had been the previous night. I immediately begin catching good fish. I fished here for about 1.5 hours and literally ran out of bait. I caught 14 catfish on my 16 pieces of bait. It was a very good morning! With rod and reel plus jugs, I caught 16 total and took 14 of them home.
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