Fishing Kansas farm ponds - page 2 - Bass, catfish, crappie and perch.

(That's my nephew Griffin Cox fishing in a small cove at Shawnee Lake in Topeka, Kansas. He'll google his name one of these days and be blown away when he finds this.)

    We tried all sorts of different baits at three different locations over a span of approximately five hours but they just weren't biting. It's like that sometimes. I tried the Magic Bait. David tried the Magic Bait as well as the StrikeKing "Catfish Dynamite". The Magic Bait chicken liver and chicken blood catfish bait stayed on the hook real well. I was surprised at how well it stayed on actually. It's got a strong, rank smell as well and I liked that too. The Strike King catfish bait is a paste. I hadn't realized that when I bought it and didn't have the proper holders for it. David did and used it liberally on two poles that he fished for about an hour at Shawnee with no luck. This really wasn't a proper test though. The overnighter at Clinton Lake will be. We spent the biggest part of our time at Shawnee Lake and Shawnee is not typically known for being a good fish producing lake. They do stock Rainbow Trout in Shawnee Lake every year. It has to be done every year because the trout always die as soon as the water temperatures start to warm up. I'm not real clear on the logic of intentionally releasing a species of fish into an environment where it can only survive for a few short months, but, well, I don't write policy.

    This is the little cove at Lake Shawnee that we started out at. Gotta hand it to the groundskeepers out there because they do a heck of a good job maintaining it. Shawnee has to be one of the "prettier" lakes that we have in this part of Kansas. I'd trade some of that prettiness for an enhanced fishing environment, but unfortunately Shawnee has never been real big in that department. If your intention is to sit on the bank of a pretty lake for hours without even getting a single bite, then Lake Shawnee is perfect for you. If you seriously want to catch fish, you go somewhere else. It's as simple as that. I've fished on that lake hundreds of times going back to when I was just a kid and in all that time I've caught maybe twenty fish. That's pitiful. I mean that's just plain sad.

    The pond we had planned to fish in was overrun with algae and temporarily unfishable. Ponds, especially the smaller ones, get that way sometimes but it generally goes away in a week or two. The technical, scientific term for this condition is "pond scum," at least that's what I call it. David said there wasn't even any point in going out there because it was that bad when he checked it. Big let down. I had planned on spending my birthday reeling them in one by one, maybe even keeping a few of the bigger ones and giving my new deep fryer a try. Alas, it was not to be.

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