This trip was a disaster from the getgo. My winter steelheading endevors haven't panned out, so decided to try for some cold water bass. After three days of beautiful sunshine, but having to work, I thought I'd get lucky and the rain would hold off for one more morning.....not.
Got my kid off to school and loaded the gear. No rain yet! Half way to the lake I thought "Did I shut the garage door?".....nuts. Back to the house....yes I did. Half hour wasted.
My plan was to use the fish finder to locate some fish and try target fishing for LM. Get the boat in the water and hook everything up....sonar won't fire up. hmmmm. Finally find that the plug at the back of the unit had jarred loose. Power it up and the screen is black.....not blank, black. I can barely make out that the sonar is actually working in the background. Fiddle with that for a half hour and can't correct the problem. Ok, I know the lake well enough, I'll just go out and do some guess work. The lake is calm, water temp 41 degrees, not raining...yet. I start working jigs and plastic in about 15 feet of water around some submerged logs....hey the sonar is working!.....Nope, it's out again. Was that a rain drop? Oh yeah, here it comes.....now it's raining, sonar not working, not having any luck on my guess work, so I decide to switch over to trolling for trout....at least I can enjoy my coffee....and now the rain is letting up....great! I take some time to swap out my gear and then I get a rapala in the water. While I'm moving up the lake I play with the sounder and during one of it's somewhat visible periods, I'm able to dial the contrast down to zero and now I can at least see the screen. Find fish between 35 and 50 feet down, so hook up the DR and run my gear down to their depth. Make a couple of passes and then the wind hits....not a breeze, not go-fly-your-kite wind, but heavy gusts.....the boat is going every direction, but straight. Enough is enough. Didn't even try trolling back to the launch, just packed it up and fought my way back to the truck.....and on the way the sonar screen went black......but, according to my wife, at least I got to go fishing!

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