After some car trouble I finally made it out to Temple Bar Marina on Lake Mead
Friday night. My fishing buddy Steve was already there with his motor home
and boat. It had been 2 years since we were here last. We couldn't wait to get into the great striper fishing that this place has.
The next morning we got our licenses, bait, launched the boat, gassed up, and paid for the slip in the marina for a week. We got out of the harbor no more than a mile and the 150 Evenrude on Steve's boat blew up! There was no fixing this motor. It was friggin' toast! Fortunately we still had his 9.9 kicker motor. It was really disappointing to say the least. We were really limited now as to how far we could go to find the fish. We decided to make the best of the situation and fish close to the marina for the rest of the week.
We knew we could still catch some fish, just not the numbers that we could have if we had the big motor. We caught 4 keepers the first morning. Nothing
real big, but they make some awesome fish tacos!
We came in and got drunk enough to forget about the setback and set out to catch some fish the next day. The weather was great! The water was smooth
as glass!
We found some fish in a cove about a mile and a half from the marina. This turned out to be our most productive spot.
We had about a dozen keepers today.
This area of Lake Mead is really scenic. We trolled and drifted when the wind picked up a little. We had some double hookups, witch was pretty cool!
On Monday we went to get bait (frozen anchovies) at the store by the marina and found out that they were out and wouldn't have any more till Thursday at the earliest. We decided to take a road trip to Vegas. We went to Bass Pro Shops and got a bunch of lures and other stuff. We stopped by Lake Mead
Marina on the way back and picked up 10 bags of anchovies! Lake Mead Marina was an absolute friggin' zoo! Temple Bar is a lot harder to get to, but this helps keep too many people from showing up there. We fished until Friday
and had plenty of bait.
I even picked up one on the crank bait. This was unusual. I trolled and casted
with all kinds of different cranks and minnow diving baits and the fish wanted
the frozen anchovies 10 to 1 over any artificials that I had in my tackle box.
This fish turned out to be the fish of the trip. Steve caught it drifting a frozen anchovy.
You never know when a big one will show up. The weather was changing . When we first started out on Saturday it was 100+ degrees and flat calm. Now it was in the 60's with a steady 10-15 mph wind and you needed a jacket all day long on the water. We loaded the boat up Friday afternoon and headed back early Saturday morning. In spite of the setbacks we still caught fish and had a great time. This is one of my favorite places to fish for one of my favorite kinds of fish.(stripers) Steve, as always, it was great to fish with you. Let's hit Temple Bar Again next year!
