Took the kids on the annual Martha lake fishing kickoff trip. Can't beat having a lake within a half mile of the house. Decided that we would throw everybody in the small aluminum boat and see how it goes. Sent the kids to dig up worms, got the batteries topped off, the wife rounded up snacks and we headed down to the lake.

We were at the launch by around 7:00am and it was not too crowded for a Saturday. The weather was not too bad as we launched and headed out. We started out with the standard pop gear setup with wedding ring and a worm. I threw a wooly bugger out on the center pole for kicks even though there was not a lot of surface activity and off we went.

We started getting some action on the pop gear and pulled in a couple within the first half hour. By that time, the kids had mostly stopped trying to assault each other and were ready to do some serious fishing. For those of you who take kids on early fishing trips, you know what I mean. The snacks were being consumed faster than we were catching fish so I decided to switch the wooly bugger up for a flatfish we had success with at Walupt lake (alpine), but had never tried on Martha. A couple fish later, the kids were asking if I had more flatfish in the tackle box.

We kept one pole with pop gear just because, and ran two with flatfish. We caught a few more, mostly on flatfish, before the bite slowed down. Most fish were lively fighters with a lot of jumps. Around 10:30am multiple full bladders signaled the end of our trip so we headed back to the launch. Altogether, we took home eight fish which is an OK day for Martha. Nothing of any notable size, probably all fresh planters. Dinner was good.

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