At famed big bass lakes like Castaic or Casitas, bass fisherman had to give up on favorite staging areas and go out looking for new ones. Under perfect conditions it would still be a difficult and time consuming task to locate and target new staging areas for the coming pre-spawn bite. Now add to that the fact that the water was cold and muddy and it starts to look like it isn’t worth the effort.

That was probably on Matt Newman’s fishing partner’s mind when he ignored a 7 am wakeup call to go fishing out on Castaic. Big mistake…

 Matt launched his boat at about 8 am and began trying to relearn how to find fish on what was essentially a new lake. Matt remembered a spot he had caught fish on the last tie the lake levels had been this high and decided to start there, running his depth finder over this old spot and seeing that the spot held a school of fish stacked up below a tree with grass on one side and a drop off on the other.

As a rule of thumb folks, don’t throw trout swimbaits in muddy water. However, Matt decided to break that rule and throw his big swimbait anyways, seeing as how fish don’t make rules about themselves and that all of the rules about them were invented by men not fish.

And so it was that on the morning of 2/10/05, Matt’s partner slept in rather than face “poor” conditions on the water, while Matt caught 28 bass in 29 casts, all around 10 lbs. It’s almost as bad as the story of Pete Best quitting the Beatles because he felt the band was going nowhere.

The moral of the story is, if you can get out on the water safely then do it. Don’t worry about conditions more than simple boating safety, as the rules of bass fishing are not only not written in stone, but they were created by men…not fish. No regrets.