Submitted by Lwhitsell (ip 62.24.253.40)

Date Fished: 6/9/2006
Water Temperature: 80
Water Clarity: 2-3 feet

(I have also posted pictures on http://www.dallaskayak.com)

Since this past weekend was my 35th B-day I packed the whole family up and we camped at Purtis Creek State Park. We went down on Thursday.

It was a family weekend but I still got out to fish every day.

Hydrilla was to the surface as far as 8-10 feet deep and there weren't nearly as many lilly pads as I remember from last year. I wonder if the hydrilla chokes them out. I hope not.

Thursday evening the water temperature was probably 80+, and the wind was still. The water was glass. I only had about 3 hours to fish so I moved quickly (for a kayak) down the east bank chunking a watermelon super fluke jr and a natural colored Sizmic Toad Jr. No luck on the toad and after I rigged up a little green Senko cut-tail worm, I picked up the fluke rod to find..... "FISH ON..!". After a fun little fight with a couple of runs, I boated a healthy, spawned out female who went ~2.5 lbs. I use light spinning and bait cast gear so those "small" bass can be a real blast to catch. I ended up boating a total of 8 bass, but she was the only keeper of the evening. I will post the pics at http://www.DallasKayak.com soon as possible.

Friday evening the conditions haven't changed. DANGIT, the camera battery is dead. Figures. The wind was still, and bass were jumping all over the place. I fished the same areas, focusing more on the edge of the underwater hydrilla, looking for larger keepers. I finally figured them out around dark. The key was to deadstick Texas-rigged, weightless watermelon Senkos and flukes right where the grass submerged. I actually began to throw one lure and let it sit while I cast another. I lucked into this method while I was picking out a nasty backlash. (First one ever!) I didn't catch as many dinks but I was onto slightly larger fish overall. I caught 3 keepers in the 14-16" range and a couple of dinks.

Went out for about an hour around 8:30 Saturday a.m. but I got skunked. I guess if there is a morning bite on Purtis, it is real early.

I ran into an old man in a jon boat who was catching a lot of bluegill in the stumps in about 8-10 feet of water. When I asked him, he said that the bluegill are spawning right now and that the hydrilla has pushed them onto the stumps in deeper water. He was tight-lining a cricket (no bobber) about 6 inches below a lead shot. He was letting it fall to the base of the stump. He caught a real nice one while I was there. I complimented him on the size and he said, “That’s one of the little ones.”

The boys wanted to fish so we bought some crickets at the bait shop in Eustace ($5/100) and headed for the fishing pier. Since the boys are 3 and 2, it was a fun ten minutes of fishing! My youngest son has quite a technique: he likes to chunk and wind his cricket about 10 times, then drop his rod and run somewhere else for a while. There were folks catching B I G bluegill. One of them was about 11 inches long and had to weigh close to a pound.

After the birthday festivities and some pretty dang good BBQ’ed pork loin (if I do say so myself!) my brother and I went fishing around 6:30 pm. Now that I was on the pattern, I dead-sticked down the east bank again, using the watermelon fluke and larger (6 ½” ?) watermelon cut-tail worms. I caught eight fish (3 keepers, largest ~3lbs) and my brother caught 3.

He lost a big one (anywhere from 4-17 lbs depending upon how much time had passed) right at the boat because it dug down into the hydrilla. He was cussing because he didn’t have a trolling motor to horse it out of the weeds… haha… oh well, kayak fishing ain’t bass boat fishing, is it?

I have also posted pictures on http://www.dallaskayak.com. Come check them out.

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