One felt like a normal laker at first, but then it just swam fast toward the boat and jumped right out of the water, giving itself lots of slack and spitting the hook
. I was not ready for that but I figured next one, I'd be prepared.A few minutes the next one hit and behaved more like I'm used to, diving fast every time I got it close to the boat. Then on one of its runs it dove, turned around and swam up so suddenly I didn't keep up, it got some slack, shook its head, and disappeared
. When I had the next one on the line I resolved not to let that happen again and came closer to actually catching it, but the fish got tangled in the other line when it was next to the boat (problem with the rowboat being it stops moving when I stop rowing to reel in a fish, and the wind pushed the boat around into the second line). Trying to net it before I lost it to the tangle, I tried to net the fish when it was almost out of reach and really thought I caught it but it thrashed out of the net and disappeared
. Then there were no more bites that I was aware of. Until I reeled in for the end of the trip and found a little smallmouth bass on the spoon, no idea how long I was dragging it around
. Maybe it could have looked like a good meal to a big fish, but nothing bit while it was occupying the hook. Catch of the day ended up being "doubles" when I had yellow perch on both lines at 6 AM. Not exactly the doubles I was targeting. The bigger perch was 13" which was pretty nice.
Some other fisherman I talked with while loading up at the boat ramp had gone 1/6 on lakers earlier, and said they were spitting hooks before even getting close to the boat, so it sounds like they're being feistier than normal these days. Water temperature was about 57 everywhere, water was mostly clear. Rainbow trout speedy shiner and purple clown Rapala were hooking the perch and the lakers using 2 to 4 colors of lead in 30-40 FOW.
