04-10-2022, 04:11 AM
With the weather forecast for Saturday a cool and windy day, Jon and I opted for Friday afternoon so see how things were going at Utah Lake. The goals were simple, try to find a live, healthy white bass and to see if the cats had digested enough of the recent easy meals to be feeding again.
The optimistic scenario was to get a healthy white in the first 10 minutes or so and then catch a normal number of cats for the 56 degree water. That would typically be 2 or 3 cats/hour.
The scenario I more expected to find was fishing for hours without a trace of a white and then not finding any cats that cared from my thawed whites from last year.
I am happy to report that Jon got a healthy looking white about 10” long and one of TubeDudes red/chartreuse tube jigs about 10 minutes into our trip. I’ve never been so excited to see one white bass!
About that time I had gotten all the cat rods ready and we started dragging. Another ten minutes and cookie cutter cat hit and from there things went exactly according to my most optimistic guess at what we would find.
Between 3:45 and 9:45 P.M. we got exactly 3 cats/hour. They were VERY healthy looking. Almost all had large guts. The best fish was 28.5 inches and should have weighed in around 9.5 pounds, but the scale showed 11.5!
Jon had a friend he wanted to give some fillets so we kept about half the ones we caught. Cleaning them I took a look inside the distended belly.....
The cat was fat and healthy, but his gut was literally a bag of bones. Lots of partially digested white bass bones and almost no remaining flesh. Now
I know why they had started biting again.
It was a great evening for weather, friendship and early cats.
![[Image: IMG-0473.jpg]](https://i.postimg.cc/PvxR0pN6/IMG-0473.jpg)
![[Image: 28-5.jpg]](https://i.postimg.cc/njVRQjKH/28-5.jpg)
![[Image: Bag-of-bones.jpg]](https://i.postimg.cc/K4qVBNsC/Bag-of-bones.jpg)
The optimistic scenario was to get a healthy white in the first 10 minutes or so and then catch a normal number of cats for the 56 degree water. That would typically be 2 or 3 cats/hour.
The scenario I more expected to find was fishing for hours without a trace of a white and then not finding any cats that cared from my thawed whites from last year.
I am happy to report that Jon got a healthy looking white about 10” long and one of TubeDudes red/chartreuse tube jigs about 10 minutes into our trip. I’ve never been so excited to see one white bass!
About that time I had gotten all the cat rods ready and we started dragging. Another ten minutes and cookie cutter cat hit and from there things went exactly according to my most optimistic guess at what we would find.
Between 3:45 and 9:45 P.M. we got exactly 3 cats/hour. They were VERY healthy looking. Almost all had large guts. The best fish was 28.5 inches and should have weighed in around 9.5 pounds, but the scale showed 11.5!
Jon had a friend he wanted to give some fillets so we kept about half the ones we caught. Cleaning them I took a look inside the distended belly.....
The cat was fat and healthy, but his gut was literally a bag of bones. Lots of partially digested white bass bones and almost no remaining flesh. Now
I know why they had started biting again.
It was a great evening for weather, friendship and early cats.