First kayak trip of 2021

[Boomstick]

So I finally made it out kayaking yesterday. I got up a little late, because the cat kept me up all night before but decided to hit up the Oxbow, a C shaped extension of the Connecticut river. It was on my bucket list of places to go but I just haven't made it there.

 

When I got there, the water was surprisingly dirty. I did my homework and I know that it's normally not dirty, but yesterday it was. So I decided to travel light and rigged up a jig and a chatterbait and a third rod that I could throw on a T-Rig if needed, but never ended up using it. I probably should have bought the spinnerbait box with me and also the crankbait rod as well in retrospect, but hey it was my first time there, and I didn't even get to look at a depth chart before I left because we literally loaded up the boats and decided that's where we were heading.

 

This means I finally got to try my new Steez AGS Bottom Contact rod + Steez SV setup, and that setup is amazing! It's a M-MH rod, but it has pretty much enough power to throw in the majority of the cover I regularly fish in. It handled the milfoil just fine yesterday, although in a few months that will require the flipping stick with braid in some of the heavier places. My one concern with the rod is that at 7'5", it might be difficult to skip sitting, but I was able to sit and skip under the dock just fine, and a good number of times I actually put it exactly where I wanted it too as well to my own disbelief (I usually hit the dock posts or the dock half the time even on a shorter rod). I was able to skip just fine with the brakes around 12, got some mild backlash a couple of times, but nothing a light cast couldn't pull out.

 

I never did get any fish, lost my only bite because I forgot to set the drag on the reel (that came on the chatterbait). There definitely were fish in some areas we were targeting, but they weren't biting.

 

This was my kids first time with a fish finder. My oldest son found dinosaur pond which is basically in the middle of the C and they marked the docks so he wanted to go try to skip the docks, so we made our way straight there with the intention of drifting back through all the milfoil and covering that spot later, but we didn't have enough time. Then when we got there, my youngest son had used his map to find a drop off on the southern side, so he covered that area to find where it was, what it looked like and found some bass sitting near what looked like a rock surrounded by vegetation at the bottom of the drop off. I'm surprised he didn't get a fish, but that was a seasoned move for someone who just used their fish finder for the first time ever. Had it been post spawn, I'm pretty sure he would have.

 

We ended up heading in early because I started feeling quite fatigued by about 6pm largely from not eating enough for lunch or breakfast. I wasn't expecting getting a full day out until late the night before so I didn't plan well. But all around a good day, we definitely learned a lot about a new location that I'm sure we will return to. I think we paddled a total of 5 miles, covered the entire Oxbow and even saw a bald eagle, two blue herons, a hot air balloon and even a guy in a paraglider who seemed to have jumped from the top of a nearby mountain as we started heading back.

[Deleted account]

1 hour ago, Boomstick said:

I got up a little late, because the cat kept me up all night...

Now I know how Aaron Judge feels when he gets the take sign from the dugout and the curve swims in down the middle of the plate...