I had a few hours to fish yesterday if I could make it down there by 5am, but my last-minute bait-tweaking OCD made me late yet again. By the time I waded through a creek, up a hill, then through some woods towards the lake it was 5:30, so the rising sun was already illuminating the clouds above the eastern shoreline. The path I chose brought me to a spot where I often like to start, and as I got close enough to sort of see the shoreline, I was disappointed to find a huge flock of geese parked right there, but that wasn't what it was after all. Huge flotillas of fluorescent green algae were set up against the western shoreline from one end to the other. I tried wading through it out to cleaner water, but it was thick as cotton candy right to the bottom, so my game plan needed to change completely.
The crazy heatwave we had here 10 days ago quickly gave way back to our typical chilly April overnights, but it left behind consequences. One was this awful algae bloom, and the other was that males had already begun making nests, just as I'd suspected after all the short strikers here during my previous session. However, all the beds I found yesterday were abandoned. It's simply too cold in the shallows now, enough that I wished I'd worn my Long Johns. The bass will be back on beds soon enough, and hopefully the algae will desist long enough for the weeds to take hold. Last year a few typically very weedy lakes farther out east never sprouted as much as a chute where the algae bloom took hold early on.
Timing is always important, but with rollercoaster springtime temps it's even more touchy than usual. I couldn't get much going yesterday during the time I had, but I'll take what I can get.