We loaded up the canoe and headed to Deep Creek Lake State Park, which was completely awesome, and arrived their Friday night. We set up camp and realized that we didn't bring tent stakes, not a big deal we thought, we can do with out them.
Around 11:30 p.m. we were heading to bed so we can get an early start and a thunderstorm passed through the mountains. A little one, nothing much to report there, then the little thunderstorm was followed by a bigger thunderstorm, then a bigger one after that, then another monster of a thunderstorm rolled through. After about 2 hours of hard rain, I feel something wet which I thought was a drink I spilled. I flipped on the light and noticed that it wasn't a drink that I spilled but it was in fact rain that had leaked throught the seams in the tent where the floor meets the fabric. You see without the stakes to stretch out the tent and allow the rain water to run off, it collected in the pockets and saturated the fabric until it started to leak into the tent, collect inside of the tent and then any movement would spill the water around. Needless to say after the cleanup and the laughter subsided I would wake up every 20 minutes afraid of getting wet again and banging the sides of the tent so I could remove any water that was trying to build up. No problem, cause I'm going to be laying into some bass, catch my first walleye, and chase after some pickerel in the morning.
We get an hour later start than we wanted because of the lack of sleep factor and headed out around 6:30 a.m. Man, the shoreline looked awesome it was all rock, the water was a little stirred up cause of the wind and previous nights rain but nothing to complain about. However, as a little time progressed more boats came out and it wasn't canoes or jon boats that came out, it was pleasure boats, pontoon boats, speed boats, big bass boats. All of them were gunning their motors around the lake and creating some nice wake. Unfortunately being in a canoe is not conducive to high wake areas, it was like being in the Chesapeake bay during high winds. We never dumped the canoe but I swear a couple of times the front of the boat came out of the water and we almost bit it. I must say I am impressed with the stability of my canoe, 16ft Old Town Appalaichain hasn't tipped us yet. This continued all morning and we called it quits about 3 hours later with no fish to our name.
No problem we thought we'll catch the nite bite around 6:30 when these people are heading back in to eat dinner. So the time comes again to load the canoe in the water and we drive down to the ramp and it's like a bass tournament and jet ski competition was getting ready to start. The lake was unbelievably rocky, waves crashing into the shore, boats everywhere at the ramp taking off, coming in. Super busy with big boats and here we are loading a canoe in, I could only imagine what people must have been thinking. Yet we pushed on, got out in the water and proceeded to try to paddle to a cove. Slow progress, as we had to turn the canoe to face oncoming wake because we didn't want to get broadsided by the waves. Once again the lake looks awesome with structure, rocks, docks, blowdowns on the shore, deep water. But with all this boat traffic I refused to believe that the fish would bite until the lake settled down. I did manage one pickerel on my LUCKY CRAFT, first fish on the lure, but that was the canoe's only fish. Discouraged that no one was getting of the lake, in fact it seemed more was getting on, we decided to paddle back to the ramp.
As we were coming back a DNR officer pulled up to us and asked us to show our PFD's and told us were out to early (8:00 p.m.) because the fish were going to start turning on as traffic started dwindling down. Sure enough, as we got back to the ramp we started seeing smaller jon boats and bass boats putting in and heading out for the after dark bite. Being in a canoe with no light on big water wasn't my idea of a safe time so we called it a fishing night. We decided that this wasn't a place to fish from a canoe and we left in the morning.
We stopped at this pond that was on the border of Pennsylvania near Gettysburg, and fished that for 3 hours. I caught 2 really nice Largemouths and one other largemouth, while my fried got skunked for the third time in a row. Which is surprising because he is the one who taught me how to fish. One side note, one of the largemouths I caught on a spinnerbait had a stringer in his mouth. He must have pulled free from someone who was trying to keep him and was still actively looking to eat while swimming around with a stringer. The fish was around a pound and half, but nothing to brag about. It was heartning to see though that my constant practice of catch and release probably turns out pretty good if I can catch a bass that still had a stringer in him.
