SPRING TRIP 2012

Needless to say, this year's trip was a little different than year's past. First of all, we had to postpone the trip because of bad weather. We pushed the trip back a couple of weeks which was fine except we weren't able to get Bryce down here. We really missed him this year. There was definitely a void. So, Matt, Nick, me and Doug headed out Wednesday afternoon. We stopped in Page to get an Arizona stamp on our licenses and waited FOREVER for someone to help us.....

We finally got to the lake (missed the ramp closure again - I swear we will make it one of these years)

Thurs morning we got up, had a nice breakfast and hit the lake! Nick started things right off and caught a smally on his first cast. Matt soon followed up with another. Nick was catching them pretty solid all weekend with his red and tan hula grub... that thing was awesome.

 The day was pretty slow but we managed to catch a few here and there using different techniques. For example, we started trolling a bit later in the afternoon and Matt starting hookin into a few stripers so we did that for a while. It seemed like we really had to fight for everything that day. We kept changing it up until we found something that worked and at the end of the day, we had caught small mouth, large mouth, stripers, a crappie and even a catfish.

That night, Mike showed up to join us for day 2. After a good night's rest, we headed out early to get a jump on things.

Right off the bat, Mike started catching them pretty steadily with a silver and blue rattle trap. He had it workin!

Later on, we found ourselves up in this little cove literally as far as we could go. I flipped a gitzit up, over, and around the corner and that's when I heard the splash! We came out of there with this guy..



          
As we traveled up this cove, we even took the time to enjoy the scenery and wondered what someone who had never been to Lake Powell (like my good friend PAM from New York who happens to be one of our biggest fans by the way...) would be thinking. What an awesome place and we get to come here a few times a year! It was a little scary having those huge cliffs just hanging over us though

Meanwhile, Nick just kept on catching fish... he was Mr. reliable all day... Not to mention, he was also the most CLASSY fisherman on the lake.

After a full morning of fishing, we went back to the houseboat to relax, and have some lunch and some laughs while we watched ridiculousness on MTV.... as it got later we debated on whether or not to go back out and boy am  I glad we did........ We ended up fishing till after dark and we were handsomely rewarded:

YEP!... Matt caught a walleye!!! So, those of you keeping score at at home, that makes

Small Mouth

Large Mouth

Striper

Crappie

Catfish

and

Walleye

And finally.... our spoils

All in all, it I'd have to say it was a successful trip. It was a little disappointing that we weren't able to catch many stripers or even a few bigger fish but we probably caught 50 fish or so in two days.... not bad. We found the conditions to be exactly what Wayneswords.com said. For some reason, the stripers are just not ready to be caught yet and we really had to work for everything we caught by changing techniques and locations. I feel like we did pretty good and gave it our best out there because even the Hooked on Utah guys we talked to said the same thing. Can't believe it's over again for another year. We might have a couple quick trips out here and there and we"ll see if we can hit a striper boil or two this summer but if not.... until our fall trip! And, hopefully we will have Bryce back then.