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Fishing Stories from Ned Kehde |
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Submitted by Ned Kehde - May 30, 2000 In the eyes of John Thompson of Ottawa and Sid Gonce of Lawrence, the long awaited spring bonanza occurred at Clinton Lake on May 23. That was when they caught and released a 40-pound flathead catfish and another that weighed 82 pounds. Thompson said the 82-pounder was the biggest he has hauled across the gunnels of his boat in nearly a half of a century of pursuing these Goliaths. While Gonce and Thompson chased Clinton's titans, Larry Blevins of Kansas City gave chase to one the of the lake's smallest denizens: the white crappie. In a four-day spree, Blevins caught 360 big crappie and 26 of them weighed more than two pounds. He extracted all of them by patiently probing the base of hedge trees of a submerged fence row on a mud flat in two to four feet of water, where they were spawning. Blevins said that it was the largest congregation of big crappie he had seen into his two decades of fishing for them. About the same time that Blevins, Gonce and Thompson were enjoying their superb outings, a flotilla of walleye anglers converged on the humps, roadbeds and mud flats at Clinton. Most of these anglers were employing the traditional motif of drifting vast areas with a jig and nightcrawler. Some of them caught a respectable number of medium-size walleye, but David Schmidtlein of Topeka used another method and waylaid three big ones, and one broached seven pounds. To accomplish that feat, Schmidtlein worked a jigging spoon in 18 feet of water along the edge of one of Clinton's main-lake humps. In addition to catching walleye, Schmidtlein enjoyed some battles with the elusive white bass. The appearance of the white bass attracted the attention of Clyde Holscher, a Topeka fishing guide. So on May 23 Holscher and a friend came to Clinton armed with casting outfits sporting 3/8-ounce jigging spoons. This duo used the spoons to pummel a 12-foot hump. Within two hours, they caught and released 35 of Holscher's favorite quarry. The white bass populations at area reservoirs have been harmed by overfishing and a bacterial virus, and the white bass at Melvern Lake have suffered the most, which has made the fishing exceedingly onerous. And even the crappie and walleye anglers at Melvern found fishing to be laborious and perplexing. Therefore anglers such as Holscher and Terry Bivins of Lebo spent most of April and May fishing at Coffey County Lake rather than Melvern. Coffey is so stringently managed that it has become the best walleye and smallmouth bass lake in the southern plains, and except when the wind blows, the fishing for those two species can be easy. For instance, Bivins regularly caught 80 to 100 fish an outing at Coffey this spring. In contrast, Bivin's periodic ventures to Melvern always ended with him boating only a half dozen fish. But on the afternoon of May 23, Melvern's denizens magically appeared, and to Bivin's delight, he caught and released a passel of walleye and some smallmouth bass and even a few white bass and crappie. Thus, as the walleye fishing at Melvern finally began to blossom, spring had finally sprung in the hearts and minds of some anglers. Still Melvern's crappie and white bass fishermen kvetched, saying this spring's bounty was the sorriest in a decade. |
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