Last Wednesday I started the fishing challenge of attempting to fish for at least an hour per day for 10 days straight. The only real rule was that I couldn't fish the same body of water two days in a row. Some crazy part of me decided I would add an additional rule that I wouldn't fish the same body of water twice for those ten days (I sort of broke that rule) in order to make it even more of a challenge. I did fish ten bodies of water (I counted ponds in close proximity as 1) in ten days. One day I fished Pick Me Up pond for .75 hours in addition to fishing a different body of water for over an hour. I later used PMU pond as my only source of fishing one day after work. So technically I strayed from the rules, but since I didn't need to fish there to meet my quota for the challenge, I still consider it to be within the rules. If it is that big of a deal to someone out there, then I failed. I'm sorry.
The toughest part of the challenge was squeezing in time to fish after a ten hour work day. I usually limited those trips to a little over an hour and hit up water in between work and my house. Those days were usually my worst number wise as it was tough to get a feel for what the fish wanted. Regardless, everyday be it one hour or eight hours fished, I still managed to bring at least one fish to hand.
I kept a series of numbers and notes each day I was out including lengths, species, lures used, etc. I made a fancy chart but it doesn't translate to the blog nicely. I'll just list the highlights in a list instead.
Bodies of water fished: 10
Hours fished: 25.25
Fish caught: 36
Fish per hour: 1.43
Length of total fish caught: 416 inches or 34.6 feet
Feet of fish per hour: 1.37
Average length of fish caught: 11.5 inches
Longest continuous time fished: 7.5 hours
Species caught: 7 (Largemouth, smallmouth, pickerel, rockbass, green sunfish, hybrid longear sunfish, bullhead)
Most numerous species caught: Largemouth (25 fish)
Largest fish: 24" Pickerel (New personal best)
This also completed the challenge of catching a 20" or greater pickerel, so I crossed that off and put up catch a 25" or greater pick. I always need something new to shoot for.
As much as I like fishing, it did get a little tiresome trying to fit fishing in everyday. Had I not had to work or I was catching more fish, I wouldn't have minded as much. I'll let the pictures do the rest of the talking.
