Lake Mead Trip (Bevin and Dale's Birthday)

This past weekend we took of to Lake Mead for a fishing trip to celebrate Bevin and Dale's birthdays, both born on May 5th (Dale - 52, Bevin - 59). It was a great trip and caught a bunch of fish. The fish are spawning so the small mouth and large mouth were biting.

We left Friday morning early and got to the lake around 9:00 am. By the time we got the boats launched the south wind was blowing pretty good, but for the sake of providing food for some families we sacrificed life and limb for the cause. We pretty much were soaked by the time we got to our fishing area. Dale made the comment as we were leaving the boat dock that it was only a white flag warning. Not sure what that meant, but he said that was good. I guess the good part was we were the only ones on the water so we could fish anywhere we wanted.

We found one of those long skinny canyons where we were out of the wind and dropped off our camping gear. We only took sleeping bags and slept on the ground. Really roughed it.

After unloading we went right to what we came for and that was to fish. The swells were 3-4 feet so it was a little difficult to control the boat, but the fish were biting pretty good. We only swamped the Dale's boat once when one of those white flag waves came over the back of the boat. As is usually the case when things get hairy out in the middle of the lake, we found out his bilge was plugged up. We made it back to shore and began the work on the boat at the lake thing and found a sunflower seed had plugged the line. Darn sunflower seeds, could have cost us our life. We could never determine if it was a dill pickle or cracked pepper, the only two brands we had in the boat, nor who was the culprit that spit it in the boat. Any chance of a saliva match was gone since it had been floating in water for some time. It would have been tough to pin it on anyone anyway since the boat floor was pretty covered with seeds and all aboard had one side of their face that looked like a chipmunk walking out of the local pet store on the day they were giving away all the free nuts you could carry in your cheeks.

We did try fishing from shore like we did at Easter with not to much success. In the evening we tried some fishing for small mouth bass and found out they were biting as good as the strippers. Saturday we mostly walked the shores because the wind was now blowing from the north and harder than the day before. The green gitzit swim bait was knocking the fish dead, no pun intended. We were catching large mouth, small mouth and strippers just waking the shorelines and it didn't matter which shoreline, they were biting everywhere. They must have been spawning. Anyway it was a ton of fun.

We finally headed home around 2 on Saturday, not because the fish had quit biting, but because we didn't know what the wind would be like going back.

Here are a few pictures of the trip.

Here is the canyon we camped in.

Golden was in charge of cooking our pre-cooked Tony Rama ribs



Here is a picture after dark of the canyon we camped in with the full moon up. Pretty bright huh?

Here I am working the shoreline for bass

This is a mountain sheep that passed through camp upset that we were blocking her drinking area.

Filleting the slaughter, you can see the remains in the water

A coyote passing by the boat dock to check out how the fishing went. I whistled for him to come and ask him to come here, you can see that he thought about it for a minute.