Reservation Number : 42649
Property Name : Grain Bin Lake
Reservation Date : 03/15/2025 All Day -
Total Fish/Sizes : 20 Overs & 1 Under
Lures Used : Moving baits

We arrived just after 7:45, just after it was good and fishing light. Coming into the property, the road is solid rock and very easy to locate, just off the highway. ( Take 175 to Malloy Rd and NOT 45 through Wilmer to the lake. On the way out, we took Malloy West to 45 and almost got beat to death. The paving is awful due to truck traffic. ) The rock road was great, it runs right up to the gravel launch.  It is easily doable for even a small sedan, no truck is needed.  The launch is a bit shallow if you back in straight, and I could not get my skiff deep enough to launch, but if you angle just a bit towards the south towards the GIGANTIC pontoon style boat” it gets deeper much faster and you could easily launch anything short of a big striper boat. After I found a better angle the launch was solid and I had no problems launching or recovering my 15’ glass skiff. Unfortunately, as we were launching I managed to kick off a loafer into the water and we had to rescue the fallen “Hey Dude” before it met Davey Jones lol.  The weather started as perfect as you could ask for, overcast with a 5-7mph breeze. We dumped the first few fish on the flat but got into rhythm after about 30 minutes and caught them pretty steady all over the flat working the edges of the grass and pondweed near the steep contours.  The lake is full and the water temp was 62 and very clear in most places it was easily 3-4’ vis in most places, and in the back ”Hidden pond” it was CRYSTAL clear, probably 8’-10’ vis easily.  ( The owner did say he had just fertilized and expected a bloom) We found that the fish was a steady slowish retrieve on moving baits and only bit on bluegill patterns pretty much ignoring anything else. There is a lot of pondweed, grass, and slop in this body of water, but if you keep your bait up in the column it's really no issue. We caught fish all over the lake, which is a break from what we saw in the other reports.  98% of our fish came adjacent to cover, and ambushing out of the grass, although I did scope around, the fish were not out and roaming.  If a guy wanted to weightless T rig around the grass, I'm sure he would slay, but I don't have the patience for that, power fishing all the way for us! The banks in the long narrow portion are near vertical drop to 15-20ft and we caught fish there as well down both sides at about 6’ in depth using the same tactics as on the flat. All of the fish we caught were very healthy and beautifully colored up.  All but one fish was in the 2.5 – 4lb range, the best fish of the day was a 4.4 and our best 5 went 19 lbs. We caught 20 fish in total with ONLY ONE fish for the cooler.   We fished from 7:45 till 3 pm with a lunch break around noon. If you like catfish, shrimp, or cajun food in general, you HAVE to try Doe Bellys. It is only 5 minutes from this property and it was the best fish and shrimp I have ever eaten, the boudin eggrolls were also amazing.  Just before lunch, the owner stopped by to check in and chat. He had great things to say about the club being good stewards of his land and NEVER leaving trash, or generally causing any issues! I thanked him for the access and let him know we would surely be back. Once the overcast blew off mid-morning and the wind picked up to about 15mph steady, the bite got to be a little bit of a grinder, but we still managed to get bites! Overall, this will be a lake we go back to for sure, we had a great bit of fun. Talking with the owner, and what we saw, this isn't a “PB hunting” property, but it was great fun to catch a bunch of solid and hard-fighting 3# fish! I included some screencaps of my graphs in the pictures to help out you guys who don't have anything to see the bottom contours! If you have a Garmin graph, I uploaded this to the Active Captain community, so you can all download it!