Takin a Young Buck Fishing

Gabe is eleven and the son of my friends/neighbors Mike and Jennifer. He's been asking me to take him for a year so as the days of summer are waning, I decided to make good on my offer. I picked him up at 5:30 this afternoon, we stopped at subway to pick up some dinner to eat on the water, stopped by Adam's to dig up some worms and launch the canoe on a neighborhood lake. It was slow going, but as the sun set, things heated up when we found some bluegill beds and some bass hanging around trying to grab a quick meal. I landed several small bass on topwater jerks and 4 inch unweighted finesse worms, then Gabe hooked into the monster bluegill picctured above, cool ass markings on this 9 inch porker!
Gabe's largemouth bass, can I get a hell yeah for worms from the compost pile?

Gabe freaked out when I hooked into this fat 13 inch largmouth, I knew I had a decent fish, but Gabe went apeshit when it jumped 4 times 2-3 feet out of the water. Then all of a sudden he goes "Oh man, John I have a fish too!" Here is a picture of our double, He got another sweeeeeet bluegill. We had to paddle back soon after this toget Gabe home by 8:30. Good times.

studio to river

I spent the morning and last night working on some new paintings, then had a studio visit from the curator for my Solo Exhibition in the spring in Reston. I grabbed canoe and headed out for a few hours and I did pretty well on topwater jerkbaits (about 10 fish, mostly 12-14 inches and a little chunky) . I'm telling you guys, you need to come up and go fishing with me here, its 10 miles from my house - fishing trips for 3--4 hours can be done, as can all day and even and overnighter, camping out on an island in the middle of nowhere - who's in?