Varner Report for 1st week of May

[Randall]

Water Clarity: 4 feet or greater

Fishing at Varner is really picking up now over the past few days. The fish are still scattered from the spawn but feeding pretty well. The big fish are starting to show back up after the spawn and feeding again Water temps are 75-76. The bass are mostly on structure from four to eight feet deep and there are a few staying very shallow and taking advantage of spawning bluegill. There are still some bass spawning deep and near deep water and I found a bunch of them Saturday afternoon between the boat ramp and the dam. I am seeing huge amounts of fry moving into deep open water on my depthfinder over the past couple of days and the water is clear so the open water schooling bite on fry will start any day now. There are some spawning shad in the am but the threadfin population is still pretty low so you have to look hard for the spawning shad. The hydrilla is about four to six inches tall where I have found it growing and there is still some pond weed that's looking good so it is looking great for summer fishing.

The bite has been real simple for me over the past three days I have been on Varner. Straight tail worms like senkos, trickworms, and pork pins are getting both numbers and quality fish. Numbers on the worms are running between twenty and thirty fish on a good day with two or three people fishing. The Mattlures Hard Bluegill in both the floating and sinking models are producing some incredible topwater strikes from fish between three and eight pounds. We have also caught a few fish on lipless crankbaits.

The photos are some of the fish caught Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Thursday I took a couple of ladies out so they could learn how to bass fish. Their goal was to catch some fish and be able to go home and teach the kids a thing or two about bass fishing. They caught more and bigger fish than they had ever caught before and had a thing or two to teach the kids when they went home. They have two bass caught at the same time in one photo and another nice fish in the other photo. The photo on the bottom right is one of my clients from Saturday. They just wanted to learn a little about the lake and how I fish it so we moved around and hit a lot of spots and caught fish on most. I lost count of how many we caught but the best five was around fourteen pounds just skipping around the lake after catching one or two in each spot. I went back out to a good spot where we had seen a lot of bass shallow after taking them back to the ramp in the afternoon. I caught the big bass in the middle left photo. I also had  four more fish between four and seven pounds that I didn't photograph. The photo on the bottom left is our best fish from Friday's trip.

[Randall]

Here are a few more pics from the last week of April. All of these were caught on Mattlures swimbaits except the two smaller fish on the left of the first photo. They were caught on a jig and a worm.