Tonight's Platte Lake Report: Pretty Dog better Bass

Once again tonight there was the chance of thunderstorms, but tonight they missed me completely. There was a pretty big looking storm quite away to the North. When I started fishing at 5:30PM it was overcast with a 7mph West wind, but it cleared up around 6:30PM and the wind died to around 3mph.

I decided to start at the reed bed at the South end of the big island where I started yesterday. I wanted to see if the area might have gotten better, but it didn't. My first fish was a pike on the watermelon red Zoom Horny Toad. I only got a single 14 inch bass on the stuff I fished yesterday. Instead of pulling out when I was done fishing the point of the reeds I headed West to fish in the very sparse reeds and also along the South Shore of the Island. I came to a few good looking trees in the water but they were not holding fish. I did however pick up an occasional pike or bass on a black/red Monsoor Swim Jig with black/red fleck Zoom Speed Craw among the very space reeds. One little area gave up several fish including this 22" dogfish.

I fished around the Southwest tip of the big island and a little ways up the West shore without success. The sun had come out now and once again I retraced last nights locations and hit the docks and reeds off the tip of the North Point of Channel Inn bay. I didn't get anything off the docks but got two quality bass out of the reeds on the Horny Toad. I took this one's picture because it was as big as anything I caught last night at 15.5".


Next I headed to the NW corner of the lake where once again I fished last night. I pretty much committed to the Zoom Horny Toad for the rest of the night catching some quality fish in the process. I caught a 15.5" and then I got this 16.5"

As I got to the end of the run of the big reed bed I was fishing I nailed this 17.5" which was big fish of the night.

A couple minutes later I got another 16". There was still some light left so I ran to a point on the North end of the lake. This move turned out to be a disappointment because I caught 1 small bass, missed a little pike that I didn't want to catch anyway and I missed either a dogfish or a big bass right by the boat; I am pretty sure it was a dogfish. When it was clear this area would not pan out there was still enough light left to hit the other point and so I did that but all I did was miss 3 or 4 bites which very well all might have been pike. I finished around 9:40.

So in 4 hours fished I caught 16 bass, 8 pike, and 1 dogfish. Last night I fished an hour longer had 1 less bass and the size of my best 6 were quite a bit smaller, so tonight was the better night.