Well it’s that time of year between deer hunting and the spring turkey season that gets Pete and I fired up... It’s spoonbill snagging time in Missouri.
We got a late start to the morning because Makenna was sick and decided it would be a good idea to puke on herself at the Dr’s office. Pete, Nick, and I finally got on the road to the Lake of the Ozarks around 10:45am. The temps were closing in on 80 degrees by mid-afternoon, but there were also high winds blowing from 20-30mph. After arriving at Levi’s lake house around 1:45pm we got our gear unpacked and put the boat in the water, and we were snagging by 2:30pm. Joe had been down fishing for two days already, so we were able to get into fish right away. Between the two boats (Joe/ Pete in Joe’s rig and Brian/Nick in the slaying rig) we ended up banging 14 spoonies the first day. Brian led the first day total by snagging 6 spoonies, but the majority of fish we caught were small males. Joe caught the biggest fish of the day when he landed a 70+lbsr. To highlight the first day Pete finished the night outing in style when he snagged a big 12lbs. flathead catfish (too bad Brian can’t tie a knot or else we would’ve had a couple of huge slabs for the frying pan!!!
Friday morning greeted us with much colder temperatures with the highs in the lower 50’s and dropping throughout the day. Levi and the Marshall boys finally made it down that afternoon and it was time to seriously get after the hunt for monster spoonies. Unfortunately we found out real quick that the fish were hard to find and spread out everywhere. Nick put the hurt on Pete and me when he landed all 4 of the spoonies that came into our rig for the day. Between the twelve guys we only caught 18 on Friday, which was our slowest second day of snagging to date. The highlight of the day was getting buzzed by couple of A-10 Warthogs that flew over us; right on the deck!
The Saturday temps were even colder than Friday’s and with thunderstorms in the forecast for the early afternoon everyone hit the lake early. The action was a mirror image of Friday....speratic action at best! Everyone seemed to catch some fish but like the previous day the fish were smaller and few and far between. The biggest salvation of the day was Nick banging out a 23lbs flathead catfish; we tied this one properly. He was pretty fired up and it was his biggest cat to date on rod and reel. Unfortunately Saturday afternoon Mother Nature decided to unleash hell on us with strong thunderstorms, luckily our boat was safely under the dock cover before the brunt of the storm hit. Some of the other boats in our group were not so lucky!
Sunday morning we woke up to clear skies and much warmer temps, but with the fishing being so slow we decided to pack it up early and head home to please the woman folk. We’re making another trip down in a couple weeks, so hopefully the fish will have started stacking up by then.
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