Willard Bay...light reading

[TubeDude]

Thanks Pat, great post...  I had been wondering what had happened to the yearly posts, they were a lot of fun to watch how the numbers fluctuated...  Really like you're summary for Craig, it puts it into a pretty nice cliff note format... Kind of miss the days of lots of big crappie... When I first started trolling Willard I used to pick up 13" crappie on the worm harnesses I was using for the eyes...  Used to catch four or  five species a trip on a regular basis the first couple years... (Cats, eyes, crappie, small mouth, wiper, gills) But that's when the water was high and I was trolling the dikes... was also in May, so it was the best of times.. Later J

Yep.  Willard has had its better days and we all have memories of stellar trips...of multiple species or of wild and crazy action on our targeted species for the day.  It's been a long time since there have been any "wiper boils".  But in former times there was some wide open crazy action on those striped sided demons.  In those days as soon as a boil erupted a dozen boats would rocket toward the commotion.  And everybody would be bendo...until some doofus motored right through the boiling fish.  Learned some new words on those occasions. 

TubeBabe and I had some days when we stayed inside the north marina in our tubes and had wipers boiling all around us off and on all day.  All we had to do was reach out and dunk a white plastic shad in the water in front of us and it was game on...with fish bouncing off our tubes or our legs in the water.  We got "fish rash" on our hands from catching, handling and releasing 20 to 30 wipers each...keeping only two or three for the table.