The best thing about being stupid enough to fish on a weekday where thunderstorms are a part of forecast is you get the lake nearly all to yourself. Fayette normally looks like a Walmart parking lot, as we all know, especially back in the woods. I didn't get there until 8 AM on Friday and counted a total of three trailers in the parking lot at Park Prairie Park. So I started by working my way down the dam toward the trees starting about midway. The bass didn't want to have anything to do with my chatterbaits, and I tried green, bream, and black/blue. Trailer/no trailer, not a single bite on one. Same for lipless crankbaits and a swimbait on a head spin jig. Nada. They would hit a squarebill crankbait bounced around the rocks just a few feet off the dam and my modified Ned rig fished out a ways in about 10-15 ft. of water, however. Instead of the TRD, I used the slightly longer Z-Man Hula StickZ and a ShroomZ jighead to which I had attached a loop of 80 lb. test mono with shrink tubing to make it snagless. The drawback to this is the tubing covers the keeper wire on the jig and the bait kept slipping down the shank. A drop of superglue would probably have fixed it, but I just pushed it back up every now and then. I also just started using Megastrike, and I feel like it does make them hang on to your soft plastics more aggressively. At any rate, it certainly didn't hurt things, since I was able to boat probably close to three dozen good ones, most of which were 2-2.5 lbs., a few under, a few over that average.
Once I was back in the trees, I couldn't get bit on the squarebills I was using along the dam, so I switched to a T-rigged worm - Zoom Dead Ringer, green pumpkin, 8" - and started catching them. I hit one spot where I was catching them on every cast for a while. I switched up to a Zoom Trick Worm and caught a few, caught a few more on the Ned rig, a few on a Senko, and also caught one on a Yamamoto Kreature in Black/Chartreuse, but they really liked that Dead Ringer.
Then there was one point later in the day when I thought I had gotten hung on a branch. I was fishing in about 15 feet of water when my worm just stopped moving on the lift, no bite or anything. It just stopped. I tugged on it and it gave a little, so I hesitantly set the hook, still thinking I was on a branch, so I didn't really commit like I should have. Then it started moving. I started reeling and it busted the water and tail danced and the mouth on it looked enormous, and I got so excited and worried it was going to wrap around a tree, I just kept reeling and forgot to cross its eyes. Well, the second time it came out of the water, it threw the hook. One cool thing about having a cove all to yourself is you can yell and swear as loud as you want and nobody cares, except maybe the birds. I have to admit, it's hard to feel disappointed when you're catching them in numbers, but man that really would have been a nice way to end the day. I have no idea how big it was; all I know is it would have made everything else I caught that day look like a dink. Oh well, I'm learning...
The water was dead calm, but it had been raining pretty steadily all day. I was drenched, and I could see lightning and hear thunder in the distance from time to time, but that didn't bother me too much. I figured if I could count less than ten seconds between lighting and thunder, I would get off the water, but that didn't happen. What did happen was the wind suddenly picked up around late afternoon and really started blowing hard and the flat lake I got to enjoy all day was starting to white cap and roll, so I peed on the fire and called in the dogs. All in all it was a very good day.