60 Degrees Yesterday

Gus and I started putting in brush yesterday and will continue today. Have to suspend fishing operations for a few days. This is important for you to have good places to fish. We have some excellent places and will add a few more new ones. The Norfork Lake Chamber had it’s annual meeting Sunday and Jeremy Risely, the area fish biologist, was the guest speaker. Jeremy was born here, is a good fisherman, and has the area lakes in his interest. They are experimenting with synthetic fish attractors and are monitoring several on both lakes and adding more and making improvements on them. He also said they were resuming the natural habitat program and start replenishing brush piles next year. Both of these are good news for us anglers. He said there were 203,220 fingerling Black Crappie, 22,210 Yearling Blue Catfish, 8,460 Catchable Channel Catfish, 22,000 Yearling Channel Catfish, 48,185 Fingerling Hybrid striped Bass, 134,865 Fingerling Striped Bass and 200,000 Fingerling Walleye stocked in Norfork Lake in 2014. Not bad. It sounded like they were working hard and doing a lot of monitoring to help the overall fishing. He said there was no plans to stock Yellow Perch in Norfork as they are not doing so well in Bull Shoals. The fish numbers in Norfork Lake are about what he wants them to be. Everything sounded pretty good. The lake level is 549.96 and dropping steadily with heavy generation. This is the first time in several weeks it has dropped below 550. We are at a very good level for the end of January but they usually keep it lower in the winter. I have been catching some good bass everyday.