Hi fellow Ranters,

There’s been an unlikely thief of our bait lately!

Unlikely Thief

The spot that we go fishing a lot has been great. There’s a lot of opportunities in the area that’s well protected but also easily accessible. That’s hard to find in a lot of fishing spots. They can be dangerous but also hard to get to. This one is great because it’s easy to get to, right off the road and there’s guard rails to stand behind so you don’t have the fear of getting smoked by a car that’s driving too fast or not paying attention.

The spot has really been something great when it comes to fishing with shiners! I don’t know when the last time I fished with shiners was, must have been when I was very young because my dad always uses fake worms or night crawlers. Shiners are a bit on the expensive side for bait but they do almost guarantee that you’ll catch something at least so that’s a bit of a win. We have a great bait bucket that my wife bought me so we are able to keep the shiners alive in the house until we are able to go fishing the next day. I don’t want to try and keep shiners longer than that amount of time so we usually just get them the night before we go fishing early in the morning.

Hard to see in this picture but one of the shiners we got was practically a fish itself! It was huge! Most of the shiners are only 2-3 inches long or so and an ounce or two. The one we got here was a few ounces and maybe 5-6 inches long it was nuts! We ended up letting it go since it was a pretty big fish and we figured it would be good to let it go so it can maybe make more shiners in the lake. I found out later that we could have used it without a bobber to catch a pretty big bass. I’ll know for next time it seems! The shiners though were all pretty good for their sizes so we had some luck with the bait shop giving us good ones.

What we weren’t expecting though was the craziness that we had! Lol. One side of the fishing spot we use has a lot of Lilly pads and other stuff. It’s not the best spot we’ve fished, we usually lose our worms and also haven’t caught any good fish over there. Most of the people that I talk to also have similar stories about not getting decent fish over there. This took it to the next level though lol.

When we were over there we were finally getting some bites so we were excited. We were hoping that we could end the dry spell that we’ve had in the area and had some bites that took our baits. We were thinking maybe we weren’t sitting the hooks right or the fish were smarter and were stealing the bait. We lost two shiners and three worms on the side before we realized what was going on. There was a damn turtle that was stealing our stuff! Lol. I couldn’t get a good look at what the turtle looked like but it wasn’t a snapping turtle since it didn’t have the crazy spikes on it and stuff but I’ll try and figure out what kind it was. Whatever it was it wasn’t interested in eating grasses and stuff, it wanted our baits!

I was reeling it in when I got the bite of something so I figured I would try to catch it. I let it sit and it pulled it away so I figured I would get it so I pulled it and it didn’t catch so I thought damn. I reeled it in slower this time to hopefully give it a chance to come up for a snatch and hopefully land it. That’s when I saw what was trailing it, the stinking turtle! We both had a great laugh at the thing following my bait and that it was hungry for our stuff so it was doing a good job of taking it. I was surprised to see that it was eating the shiners but I guess beggars can’t be choosers so it went for it. Tricky little bugger! We now know that this side of the lake isn’t the best to fish from the shore area, there’s snakes and turtles that will be eating the small fish so there’s not much chance that there will be anything good unless we go at the crack of dawn! lol

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