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Fishing Stories from Ned Kehde |
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Submitted by Ned Kehde - April 17, 2000 Fickleness is the nature of weather during the early weeks of spring. Such unstable weather always fouls the fishing and puts anglers in a petulant state. But this year the weather seemed more fickle than ever, which in turn made area anglers more crotchety than ever. It even kept a lot of them at bay. Perhaps the blame can be laid at the feet of La Nina's peppery ways. All winter she kept the waters at the big reservoirs virtually ice-free, and area crappie fishermen were afloat from December through February. She continued to tease the anglers by bring them a taste of April during the first days of March. In fact, on one of those false spring days of early March, several local anglers happened upon a massive school of white bass and caught and released more than a hundred of them. These anglers left the water that day with glorious visions of their next 50 days being as splendid and easy as that March outing. But shortly after those temperate days of early March and just about the time that many fishermen in these parts had been lulled into believing that Kansas had been transported to some warmer zone along the 31st parallel, La Nina began to manipulate the pronounced curves of her jetstream. Then she administered some grief by pounding Kansas with a treble whammy of rain, wind and cold fronts. For example, on one mid-March day she pulled in wet northern air, and some locales just 30 miles to the east of Lawrence got waylaid with six inches of snow. Her rains of mid-March cooled and muddy the rivers that feed the big reservoirs and soured the traditional prespawn white bass angling that anglers have grown to enjoy in past Marches. Instead of catching and releasing 50 to 100 white bass an outing, savvy anglers struggled to catch a half dozen. The unnaturally warm waters of La Cygne and Coffey County lakes, which are heated by power plants, became the only refuges for local anglers. Throughout this horrible spell of weather, these warm waters yielded scads of wipers, walleye, crappie, smallmouth bass and largemouth bass. And between the harshest outbreaks of inclemency, there were times that largemouth bass fishermen enjoy some prosperous days at the small and relatively clear community lakes. For instance, Jon Kindlesparger of Lawrence caught some nice bass at Leavenworth State Fishing Lake and Kevin Davis of Lawrence tangled with some good ones at Lone Star Lake. But even at those small lakes and warm-water reservoirs, anglers were continually bedeviled by chilly days and buffeted by harsh winds that broached 40 mph. Some old-timers couldn't remember the wind blowing that hard and frequently in late March and early April. With such incessant winds, even the die-hard fishermen struggled to find a small window of opportunity to wet a line. The only positive aspect was that the water temperatures at all of the waterways registered slightly above their seasonal norms. And the warm water temperatures kept the largemouth and smallmouth bass actively feeding in shallow water along the rocky shorelines of the big reservoirs. Even when anglers are bombarded with La Nina's hostile ways, these bass are always the easiest species in northeastern Kansas for anglers to catch in late March and early April. Thus, when the wind moderated for a few hours, Jim Joy of Grantville dashed to Perry Lake and played with some largemouth bass. Likewise Terry Bivins of Lebo scurried to Melvern Lake, where he caught and released as many as 17 smallmouths in four hours. |
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