With Fisherman's Warehouse pro Ken Mah
Clear Lake right now, is in a late winter phase. In the morning, the water temps are 49 degrees, so still pretty cold, but in the shallow part, in the north end of the lake, I saw temps as warm as 53 degrees.
As we know, there was a local tournament that was won there recently, and they had 45 or 47 pounds. So, there's still a lot of big fish being caught, scoping, and a lot of those anglers are spending their time in mid-lake and the Rattlesnake Arm.
People can still catch those fish. Those fish are the ones – the few that I caught scoping yesterday.
They seem to be in 18- to 22- to 23-feet.
I had a pretty good day fishing shallow. There's little pods of fish that are starting to move up and they're making that first initial push.
I probably had close to 25- to 26-pounds yesterday, fishing in like 8-feet or less.
For me, it was simple fishing, like throwing a half-ounce or 5/8-ounce spinnerbait with a Big Bite Swimmer on the back of it – a white one. And then just reeling that thing as slow as I can.
I'm throwing it on a 7.5-foot, Phenix, Virtus frog rod with Shooter fluorocarbon.
I caught like three on a spinnerbait doing that. They were really nice – healthy ones. The biggest one I caught was almost five-pounds and then the other two were good four-pounders, just solid fish.
Then, I started flipping isolated bushes in 6- to 8-feet of water. I caught four fish doing that, but I only caught seven shallow yesterday – basically, with my MLF setup, a Buckeye flipping jig in black and blue with a Big Bite Baits Baby YoMama trailer on braided line. It's really simple fishing.
I do think you can scope a lot of fish and throw a minnow on a jig head, but for me, I think there's less people on the bank, which I love. So, I'm still going to gravitate and do that.
Tips: Overall, I would say Clear Lake is still in that late-winter stage. I wouldn't even call it pre-spawn. I would think anybody that goes there should anticipate getting only a few bites still and when I say few, I'm talking six to nine bites all day. You know, so it's definitely not wide open yet.
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