January Wraps Up, Looking Forward to Dry Season

January 16 to January 31, 2009
We're still waiting for the "dry season" to come to the Lake Arenal area, but we are catching fish, rain or shine.
Still getting a lot of strikes by irritated machaca, and landing most of them. Water temp is up to 73 degrees, so we're catching more guapote, too.

On January 27 I took out William Crow from San Pedro, California, and we caught a "first" for me on this Lake.
While casting a light-yellow spinnerbait into the grassy shoreline for guapote, he got hit HARD. As he fought the fish to the boat, I scooped it up with the net to find that William had landed the biggest damn tilapia I'd ever seen in the wild.

I got out the Boga Grips and he weighed in at just over 8 lbs., which doesn't sound that big, but he had huge shoulders and a big belly on him.

Since the tilapia compete for food and can quickly take over a lake, I encouraged William to take it back to his hotel or restaurant to eat -- he'd been hoping for a "keeper", too! Will also caught several medium guapotes, large enough to make a good meal, but we threw those back.

The end of the month brought one more cold, blustery storm that made fishing a bit of a challenge. The rain brought the topwater temperature down a bit, and slowed down the guapote bite.
All we need now is a couple of sunny days to bring the temps back up again.