February 22, 2023. We met Captain Jim Pruitt at the Marsh Park Boat Ramp on an inland lake we’d never heard of called Lake Yale. It was a 45-minute drive from the Hontoon Resort on Florida back roads and mostly in the dark. I was excited to fish a new lake.
The lake was foggy. In fact, so foggy, we got part way out into the lake and stopped to fish because it was hard to navigate.
This video is a panoramic of the fog first thing in the morning, starting with the image below, which is fuzzy due to the fog. That’s Captain Jim in the foreground and Mark in the stern.
The sunrise was blurred by the fog.
We managed to catch one small largemouth bass in the fog before moving off to the far end of the lake towards the weeds. This photo showed how the fog had burned off part of the lake, but part was still embedded in fog. I admit there is something calming about seeing across a lake, when the fog lifts. This short video shows more.
By 9:05 Mark and I had both pulled nice bass out of the weeds and we felt we were going to have a great day on the water. I love the photo of Mark with Captain Jim in the background.
This coot was hanging out by us in the weed patch we fished all morning. I loved the zagged reflections of the reeds when the wind blew lightly.
This female ruddy duck also showed up in the reeds to see how the fishing was going.
When the shiners had done all they could to attract fish, Captain Pruitt removed them from the hook and threw them into the water, attracting ospreys. Watching ospreys circle around overhead was fun–it was always interesting to see how long they were willing to wait for the minnow to float away from the boat before they’d try to nab it. This video and this video both show ospreys nabbing minnows.
In the early afternoon Mark caught this longhouse gar, which would be the only gar that we got to the boat and therefore the largest gar of the trip. This toothy fella probably took more than one minnow from us. In fact, longnose gar went in and out of the weed bed all day long. This fish was released without bringing it into the boat.
Our fishing day ended with a dinner at a restaurant Captain Jim recommended called Brian’s Bar-B-Que in Deland. Mark, being our meatatarian, loved it. I loved the endless, giant salad bar. I also got a kick out of the Butt Rub they sold.
By the end of the trip, this restaurant would be one of our favorites due to the good meats for Mark and the fact that it was one of the least expensive places in town. We paid half the amount of other restaurants in town.
And with that, we went back to Hontoon Resort to enjoy another wonderful sunset.