Made it home in one piece from vacation in sunny Florida. We spent 10 days in Pensacola Beach. Weather was perfect.
Unpacked the truck, spent most of Friday resting up from the drive. Saturday did a few chores in the victory garden, placed
four loader buckets full of limestone cobble on the pond dam, and then took Mrs. Augie out there to see if I could get her
on one of the HSB.

Those fish haven't been super easy to catch on artificials, and using nightcrawlers results in catching a lot of BG/HBG/RES,
so we sacrificed an old pair of pantyhose to use as a wrapper for Optimal Hand Throw pellets. I rigged a smallish casting
bubble at the end of the mainline, then used a short piece of Berkely Vanish to a #1 Owner circle hook on the terminal end.
Hook a corner of the pantyhose bit, place a pellet, then hook up the other four corners. Simple and effective.

[Linked Image from hosting.photobucket.com]


She caught two of them and I put both of them to the knife.
This one measured 19.75" and weighed in at 3.66lb, which is a bit shy of what the Wr chart I'm using says it should have weighed.
The other was 19.5" and 3.44lb. Both fish had a ridiculous amount of belly fat so I'm a bit perplexed by the Wr results.
I was also slightly surprised by the gut content of these fish. It's been three weeks since they got any pellets, and with the numbers
of small BG/HBG/RES/YP in the pond I expected to find their gullets full of fish. What I found was gullets full of crayfish.
My theory is these pellet munchers are too lazy to chase fish so they're going for the slow moving mudbugs instead.

[Linked Image from hosting.photobucket.com]


After the 2nd HSB was landed I switched her over to nightcrawlers just to get an idea of how the panfish are doing.
She caught several nice RES, one eater (7"-9") BG, and this one that measured 9.5" and weighed .74lb, which is right at 100% Wr
according to the chart. I wouldn't have killed this one, but it was hooked a bit deep and I figured it would croak anyway so it went
into the butcher bucket with the HSB.

[Linked Image from hosting.photobucket.com]