I love to fish. I mostly fish from the bank. I do have a kayak, so I can get out on the water, but I can thankfully get to a pond or lake very quickly and start fishing from the bank right away without having to dedicate a whole day to it, and without much prep time. There are ponds in my neighborhood that are really close and really fun to fish.
My usual approach is to set out a line or two for catfish. Usually this is with shrimp or some sort of bait set on the bottom. While the catfish line sets I will usually work a lure for bass. My go-to is a Roostertail (inline spinner). I also enjoy catching bluegill, so if I’m having no luck with the bass, I’ll put a piece of bait on a small hook and try and find the bluegills (bream, sunfish, etc.).
The ponds close to the house are full of little mudcats (bullheads). These things are fun to catch and when the bite is on, they will bite on anything and anywhere. I’ve caught them on shrimp, sausage, bacon, corn, etc. On the slower days, shrimp seems to be the best, although I have not tried worms. Shrimp is the easiest and cheapest thing to keep around the house. I get the cheapest shrimp I can find, which is usually at the Asian market. Shrimp is not cheap, but I can get a pound for under $5, and that lasts a long time. I can get 2-3 pieces of bait out of one shrimp, and many times I catch multiple fish on the same piece of shrimp.
There are days that they just won’t bite, but most days I go I will catch at least a couple in a couple of hours. That’s a slow return on my time, but even at that rate, it’s a lot of fun.
Last Saturday I went to one of the ponds and it was one of those days that the catfish and bluegills were exceptionally active. I was getting bites as soon as the bait was in the water. My catfish line and bluegill lines had me running back and forth pulling in fish. At one point I had to decide which I was going to fish as I could not keep up with both lines.
I don’t usually keep any of the fish, but I started to put the bluegill on a stringer specifically for the photo. I caught a few before and after the batch on the stringer, so the stringer is just a small example of the amount of fish I caught. I was only at the pond for maybe two hours, but I caught around 18 fish.
As fishing goes so often, I went back to the same spot the next day using the same bait at the same time of the day in the same weather and the bite was very very slow. I only caught a couple in that same amount of time. So there you go….that’s fishing.