I headed off early yesterday morning and fished Dolloff Lake for the first time ever.
Lost a hula popper in the dark and switched to a buzzbait as I worked the shoreline, no takers an hour later so I decided to change my gameplan remembering something I read. Tied on a little 2 1/2" floating rapala and slowly trolled about 15-20 ft from the shoreline to see if I could hook into some active fish. 2 minutes later, I picked up a 9" rock-bass and minutes after that I felt the tug of another fish but lost it.
Figuring this resembled some baitfish, I decided to cast towards visible dock structure and weed edges along the east side of the lake. Picked up 6 dinks with the biggest about a pound however it was definitely fun and it all happened from about 6:30am-9:00am.
Decided to see what type of panfishing was available so I switched to my lightweight setup and tied on a live nightcrawler head casting it to weed-edges along the west shore. Picked up 2 bluegills (not pumpkinseeds, get to this later) and found myself in a school of 1-lb perch. Pulled out 12 and kept the largest of the litter. I have to admit, I like panfishing too!
Anyway, a couple observations about this lake:
- Panfish were all sizable, I never caught anything under 6" which tells me that the smaller forage population is being eaten by predators (which would explain why my 2.5" rapala was doin so much damage) and without much detectable spawning substrate, forage isnt being produced rapidly to feed the predators
- This lake is too small for all the different types of fish it holds, WDFW lists almost everything except bluegill. They should add it to the list now, they are there and I'm not mistaking them with pumpkinseed
- I didnt notice any surface activity in the lake in terms of bugs or fish, so I think most fish in this lake are foraging on the bottom
- Just like Chris said, the bass are all small which tells me they are overpopulated and are competing for forage too tightly but I'm not sure of this really since they seemed to be fairly proportionate (small heads and big fat bodies) maybe there really are some lunkers in here.
- This is a nice little lake despite not producing any real size maybe I should have fished a larger lure =(