I'm a software engineer, so kind of a data nerd so bare with me. I use an app that captures all this data -- just press a button strapped to my life jacket to log a catch

Month of June summary (154 fish in 8 trips)

June 1st -- 15 in 0:59
June 3rd -- 27 in 2:08
June 4th -- 23 in 2:10
June 10th -- 10 in 1:25
June 18th -- 21 in 1:40
June 19th -- 8 in 2:00
June 20th -- 25 in 3:40
June 25th -- 25 in 2:59

Earlier in the month, the best fish were 10 - 14 ft but that has changed as of the last week or so.

Fished yesterday morning and caught my limit in 3 hours -- released all but 5 to eat that night. Water temperature was 84 degrees. All fish caught on the same jig I've used all year -- Thump Chubby in ghost minnow color.

I had kind of a race with time yesterday -- can I catch my limit before the fish die in my live well. I'm going to have to start taking a cooler if I'm going to fish for more than a couple hours.

Most of the fish were caught in 18 - 20 fow. I tried shallower early yesterday and couldn't find any good size fish -- just a bunch of unders shallow. I'm seeing huge schools of small fish that I'm having to work around. At this point, if I see a bunch of fish suspended over the top of a pile, I don't even bother fishing it. Earlier this month I've tried catching those fish and all I do is get my jig pulled down and my shoulder sore. I assume these are either 6-8" crappie or blue gill -- as I have caught a couple of those as well. The most successful spots have been small piles where I don't actually see many fish -- just dense structure where the crappie are hunkered down. Even with the water temps, the fish are still fairly aggressive. I've not had to switch to just holding the jig perfectly still to get bit yet.

Trip stats:


Here's one of the bigger fish from yesterday, 13.5":

BTW, here's some evidence that some of those are bluegill

Ron, its the same right now on the lakes I fish. smaller cover is holding more fish than larger structure. sometimes a surprising amount!
alot of the small cover I had found many years ago, that I tended to pass by in favor of larger piles that typically held lots more fish, im going back to fishing them instead. sometimes its just remnants, of what was previously a large pile, or just a few sticks of timber. that seems to be the pattern right now.
Sometimes I just meander around in an area, and look around on livescope, for groups of fish, instead of looking specifically for cover with fish on it. sometimes the cover they are holding on is so small, I would likely not even see it on side imaging or bother to mark it and fish it if I could see it.
Im trying to slow down alot and thoroughly fish areas instead of running and gunning the major community piles.

Ron, an interesting metric you could add to your stats is daily UV index and DEPTH of catch.

Solid post with an awesome report Ron.

Good idea, thanks.

Nice post Ron. Thanks!

Planning to come down later this week, before the weekend crowd, and see if I can find a few.

IF I have enough water in the cove to get my boat out...

Ken

sorry - double tap

Good job!! I’ve wondered about the data myself but now it makes more sense!

Keep up the good work!!

I have my annual maintenance this week so I was planning to pull my boat out of my dock this week anyway. I will not be able to get it back in the dock after this week. 2.5 low is the limit for my dock so I will trailer it and pull it into the cove and tether it to my dock in the middle each weekend as long as there is water. Unless we get a tropical storm or better into the gulf, I don't expect things to get better until winter. My wife and I are making plans to spend the rest of the summer elsewhere ... which is sad but also opens up some opportunities for the wife, dogs and I to visit some cooler places that we've never visited.

Guilty as charged ... I'm a red neck geek -- kind of a oxymoron but more common than many people know.