Shorter colder and tougher day today. Over a 100 Cormorants and Mergansers were cleaning up on shad dying in todays colder water. You could frequently see the shad fluttering spasticly at the surface. There were also many tiny slender shiner type minnows visable. Even in the near freezing water, several times I saw big fish break the surface, one was in slow motion pursuit of slowly moving minnows driven to the surface. I Started at 12:00, by 3:00PM I only had one fish that hit a 3/4 ounce Silver-Blue Stripe KO Wobbler spoon but it got off after a couple of minutes fighting stubbornly. At 3:00 I got the first of 3 lakers that came quickly to that spoon. She looks like her belly is full.
In the middle of that run, the sheets of 1/4 inch ice that were left over from the previous night spread out enough for me to switch to casting flies and I quickly got 2 on a smaller 1/0 version of the larger 2/0 Mag Flash Jiggy fly that worked well 3 days ago. Same 4.6mm Tungsten bead but the smaller 1/0 hook is actually heavier than the lighter wire 2/0 hook used for bigger flies.
Here is the first fly caught Laker, deeply hooked on the fly, resting between attempts to disgorge the fly with the fly rod tip top. Second try got him off easily. If you can zoom in on this picture you can see the leader of to the left and tips of Bucktail sticking out from both sides of his jaws.
It kept getting colder, new skin Ice was forming, covering the gaps between the thicker sheets that was very difficult to fish through. Even using the heavy 3/4 ounce spoon. Still, under these difficult conditions, some other guys continued getting fish as they had all day while I couldn't get any.