I headed back to Lake Fork Tuesday morning. The forecast was for clear early, then turning cloudy as the day went, but it ended up being mostly sunny all day, and with light winds, a truly beautiful day to be sight fishing on Lake Fork. But the fishing was tough. There were still some bass on beds, but many were just swimming around and uncatchable now, especially the bigger ones. I ended up with 12 bass. Two were just under 4 pounds, with nothing bigger than that.

This pretty Lake Fork bass from Tuesday weighed just under 4 pounds.

Storms were predicted for the rest of the week, so I gave up on any more Lake Fork trips, but when I got up yesterday (Thursday) morning, it was very dark, but the storms were all west of DFW, so I decided to just stay close to home and fish a few hours at Cedar Creek, and get off the lake quickly when the storms got near. I launched at mid lake, and started out fishing a Ned rig. I’d made two new rods specifically for Ned rig fishing, and wanted to try one out. I didn’t have any luck finding bass, but in a reminder that Ned rigs will catch all kinds of fish, it seems only fitting that the first fish I caught on it was a nice large crappie. I decided to concentrate on crappie instead, and caught 7 more in the next couple of hours. One was a beautiful 2 pounder. But the storms built up and headed this was much quicker than I expected, and at shortly after 11:00 that morning, I loaded up and headed home.

My nice 2 pound crappie from yesterday morning.

Considering how warm it has stayed, and how late the bass spawn has progressed because of that, I’m thinking of giving up my Fork trips for the year, and just fishing close to home at Cedar Creek. Or I could explore something new on the lower part of Fork and see if I can find more decent numbers of still bedding bass. We’ll see.