Boiled in a boat? Skin fried for shore lunch? With all that cool, cold, deep water around you why not take a dip? Not so, because doing so can give you a false sense that things are better, but they are not.
You should never jump out of a boat unless the boat is beached and you know the area. Jumping into water that’s a lot deeper than you expected can shock your body because of the depth and the difference in temperature. While your skin can absorb water, making you feel refreshed, you still need water to drink every hour even on a cloudy day.
With summer upon us, sooner and hotter than expected, fishermen need to switch to early morning, or very late afternoon or even better, at night for their fishing trips. Drifting grasshoppers or a worm along the grassy overhanging banks of the Ninnescah River can give you anything from catfish, bass, crappie, carp to softshell turtles. Their size mostly will not be much bigger than eating size, but be prepared for that sleeper in the shape of a monster carp or catfish.
Last week my daughter and her boyfriend, Jeff, ran nine lines in the Ninnescah we’d set the evening before and caught five nice 2-pound channel cats and one softshell turtle. All came off perch in the 3- to 4-inch size and the other three lines were baitless.
There’s three kinds of wade fishing in this area that I enjoy every year. First is fly rod dry flies or floating grasshopper flies or popping flies for bass. If you land one in ten strikes you can call yourself an expert. Second is to wade about six feet out from the shore at the Kingman State Fishing Lake and cast down the shore line for bass. Every now and then you wade into a spot of cooler water, and mark it, as that spot will hold fish not only during the summer but also into the winter and early spring.
Now my favorite: Wade fishing into the waves from one of the major reservoirs like Cheney, Wilson or Kirwin. If you use a jig tipped with worm or a weighted cork with a free floating worm you’ll never know what kind or how big your fish will be. One fish can be a striper, the next a carp or catfish, drum, bass or perch.
This may not work for everyone, but for me, it sure beats the high air conditioning bills.
Pratt, Kan. —
