Tyler's Fishing Page
Pictures 2005


Adam B and I fished the Lake Zumbro Bass Tournament this evening.


We set off last night with high hopes of boating some nice bass from the shorelines of Lake Zumbro. For the most part, I was targeting smallies. We tried all sorts of shorelines and structures. Sand, rocks, banks, weed beds, docks, drop-offs. All with very little success. For the most part we were throwing medium sized (#9 or so) floating rapalas. I gave them every color I had. I also tried a variety of jigs with different sized and color twister tails.

The water was super clear. You could see about 6+ feet without a problem. I looked in my rapala tackle box and super bright colors were all I saw. I had a few darker colors and those seemed to produce the best. My partner lost the best lure of the evening on his first fish. It was a natural looking silver and black floating rapala.

As I said, the water was clear. Wind maxed out at about 3mph, so it was pretty still. We could see tons of carp all around. We also noticed that we spooked some fish with the boat in shallow waters.

Any advice on what I could have done differently? Next time I will equip myself with some more natural looking rapalas. Any other ideas?

We ended the evening with 3 small smallies, 1 small largie, 4-5 nice silver bass, 1 nice gill, and about 10 decent crappies. We found the crappies on the shallow side of 26 ft dropoff in about 3-8 feet of water. All crappies were caught minutes before dark.