Thanks guys for the good feed back. I'm glad I found this site. And thanks to the "welcoming committee"... LOL
Several years ago I use to fish bass tournaments and watched every fishing show on TV.
One show stuck with me. It was on Bill Dance's program. He had this fisheries biologist, PHD as a guest who had a theory that when a fish is hooked it released "distress enzymes" that warned other fish to quit feeding.
He recommended that if you caught a fish out of a brush pile you put him into the livewell for a while. That is until the fish quit hitting there, they you released the unwanted fish.
I thought that was a bunch of BS until I started experiencing 'odd behavior' with my fish. I might catch 3-4 bass on one lure then all a sudden you couldn't buy a strike with that lure. Change lures and catch a few more fish.
Here is another odd observation. Some of my friends and I stumbled on to this on Lake Eufaula, AL.
We noticed that we could catch on or more bass out from under a bush that a a cotton mouth laying in it. It almost was a waste of time fishing around bushes w/o cotton mouths. I mentioned this to a friend who fished Santee Cooper, SC and discovered the same thing.
I was pre-fishing a tournament on Lake Cumberland in the spring one year. The guy fishing with me noticed that we could catch a fish out of a stump that had a water snake in or near it. Needless to say we spend the day watching for snakes. We caught over 100 bass that day. Not all keepers but both my firend & I did quet well in that tournament fishing that "pattern".
Why the bass seemed to hangout around snakes I don't know unless they thought there was an easy meal there.
Yeah I've quit the tournaments got to be too much like work and got to the point that I didn't enjoy it... and then there was those pesky jet skis...
Turtles....
For the first few years I had my pond in the spring turtles would come up and just sun on the surface. I shot a couple of them with my .22 that that didn't close the book on them. I started shooting them with my .308 from a good distance away. Man you talk about making a mess out of a turtle. I'm sure the CC loved them. I shot one last year and haven't seen any in the pond this year at all. That's not to say they aren't there but they are keeping their heads down. I do see "bubble trails" every so often. Oh Yeah... I did kill one back in the spring... I didn't see him when I was mowing the yard. He sure made a lot of noise under the mower deck. Last year a friend wanted to fish my pond for turtles. He fished it daily for 3 weeks w/o catching a one.
