Fishing the Bill Dance Pond

Decided it had been long enough since I went to the samll lake here. I
fished it once in late April but the launch area has prevented me from
fishing it again. That and the quality fish I have been catching on the
bigger lakes.

I woke at 4 a.m and got my nephew up to help load the RLM on the car. We
took the minute and 30 second drive, carried the boat up to the lake and
launched. I figured since there has not been a boat out there besides mine,
that the fish would definetly turn on when we got out there. First cast
produced a 1-2 lb Lm on a tiny brush hog, my nephew then landed one in the
same size range on a speedworm. I started chucking the speedworm and landed
about 3-4 pickerel, my nephew also got a few, then the bite died, no bass,
no pickerel. Spinnerbaits, flukes, senkos etc. Nada.

This is definetly your Bill Dance pond, very very small, could not launch a
bass boat on it and you can troll from one end to the other in a matter of
minutes. Loaded with everything a bass would need to grow big except space.
The lack of size limits the bass size. The biggest fish caught out of there
since I moved up here was a little shy of 5 lbs. The average is 1-2 lbs but
there is a good population of 2-3 lber's as well. The deepest part I have
come across was about 14 feet, most of the lake is wood and lilly pads in
the 3-5 foot depth range.

Seeing as we could not produce any more bass we decided to fish the deeper
area. I tied on a jig and my nephew a hard jerkbait, believe it was a rebel
in gold and black. His first cast produced a nice lm in the 2+ range. His
second cast produced another around the same size. Hmm time to throw on a
jerkbait. I opted for the Rapala Tn shad, It was just the ticket as we both
caught a few more decnt bass, not to mention perch and pickerel. It was time
to head in and we decided to fish the shallows again with the jerkbaits and
sure enough, same areas we were fishing the soft plastics held some more
bass as we each boated about 3 more