Reservation Number : 37463
Property Name : BlackJack Ranch
Reservation Date : 10/07/2023 All Day -
Total Fish/Sizes : 56 Bass and 2 large Bluegill
Lures Used : Floating Frog, dropshot, weightless swimbaits

Fellow member John shepard and I went to BlackJack Saturday 10/7 and were treated to quite a site of acrobatic black bass. It started out to be a breezy cool morning with high clouds. We started on the pier casting in all directions to try to learn anything we could about what bass were doing. We caught a few with moving baits that we could burn over the vegetation which is still pretty thick. I threw a weightless 3.5 inch paddletail swimbait and popped it along and caught several while John threw chatterbait, wakebait and floating frog catching about the same in number and size. We decided at around 9:30 to rig the jon boat out and try out in the middle. The bank has about 20 ft wide scummy cover around almost the entire tank. The tank itself is lowest i have ever seen it (2-3 ft if i had to guess) so it would have been impossible to push the loaded boat off from the shore so we decided to put the trolling motor on the boat then drag it from the bank to the end of the pier with a rope tied to the front handle. We finished loading the gear by one of us getting in the boat and the other handing the rest of the gear to him. Anyways, we worked our way around the tank fishing the edge of the mat and looking for deeper water to see if the bigger population and bigger fish were deep. Fishing was slow but steady using pretty much the same techniques we started with except i tried the dropshot in the deeper water with some success. We took a lunch break around 12:30 and started back to work around 1:00 and thats when the show started. It was slow in the begining but John couldnt resist walking the bank and dragging the floating frog over the scum targetting the far edge from the bank and popping it slowly back trying to hit any thin spots in the scum. Right away he started getting some blowups and some hookups. I decided that looked like the ticket so i rigged up my floating frog and we decided to get back in the boat and go to the shallow end of the lake where the scum was more prominant. As we worked our way towards the shallow we noticed more and more the bass of all sizes were starting to jump out of the water in hopes of catching the dragonflies that were starting to appear hovering close over the water and scum just out of the reach of the jumping bass. It was quite the spectical to see so many fish jumping competely out of the water. There were times when you could see multiple fish jumping at the same time. Some were quite acrobatic doing complete backflips. John was able to take advantage of this situation with his floating frog that for some unknown reason was preferred over mine but i had fun watching the blowups and hookups just the same. We ended the day with 56 bass and 2 huge bluegill culling 11 of the bass. we saw some big bass jump but we never caught anything bigger than 17-18 inches most being in the 14-16 inch range. Things started to slow down around 4 pm and we were tired and hungry having been there since sunup so we decided to pack it up.