Opening Day of bass season

Hi folks, Ran the motorboat yesterday morning with spin clients for some bass fishing.  Second Saturday in June is the official opening of bass season.  Meaning you can keep them and fish with bait.  Does not matter to me as I never fish them with bait, only flies and lures and not a big fan of eating largemouth and smallmouth bass.  Water temperature was 64 degrees and the clarity were we fished was very good.  Nice damp overcast morning with showers.  We have had a big low pressure system hunkered down over New England for a few days.  More rain on our rivers which did not need.  We landed 11 bass yesterday with 9 fish being smallmouth and 2 fish being largemouth.  We did land one small pike.  The bite was not aggressive and we really had to slow down our tactics.  Even though it was dead calm conditions for a bit, we could not induce a surface strike.  We did catch a couple of fish on a fire tiger rapala twitched below the surface but most of our action came with soft plastics.  The bass are now in post spawn mode and can be little tricky to catch and a little more widely dispersed through out the lake.  Pre-spawn and spawn time is easy fishing for bass.  We fished a 2/0 red offset hook with a 5" green red flake Senko and dragged it off the bottom.  That was the ticket.  Most of our smallmouth came from rocky areas at drop offs.  However, we landed our biggest bass of the day 17" and another 16" fish in a soft bottom area with lots of emerging weeds.  Largemouth habitat and matter of fact it was the area where we caught the 2 largemouth of the day.  Litterally in less than 2' of water that I would guess does not get fished too often.  The lake we were on has lots of good sized fish and all of the bass yesterday were really nice strong fish.  Good way to start the bass season off.  Looks like another damp cool week and if our rivers settle a bit more the trout fishing should be excellent.  Small streams are good to go today.  Remember to clean your gear and keep the non-native species at home.  H

ave Fun, Willy