Dogs and catfish

Cute ... until they became annoying.

All three smallmouth looked
like this.  In fact, I think
the second and third ones may
have been the same fish!

I fished this morning at my secret spot on the Little Patuxent River catching three wee smallmouth bass and a catfish.  The first smallmouth hit (that's being generous) a Z-Man TRD Finesse worm, while the rest of the fish were caught on a Reaction Innovations swimbait.  The catfish hit the swimbait just as it hit the water, so I figured it was a smallmouth.  At least catfish fight better than failfish.

I mentioned before that Bass Pro Shops has a swimbait that looks really similar to the RI plastic lure. I used the RI swimbaits last week and this week, and I think they have a little more action than the BPS Sassy Sally.

Also, my last trip to the secret spot, I encountered a couple dogs -- one male that looked kind of like a pit bull and a female that looked like a mutt.  This time, after fishing for about an hour, I heard barking and three puppies (maybe six months old?) came bounding out of the woods and barking.  They seemed friendly but still puppies.  One tried jumping on me when I reached down to pet it.

"OK, fine, I'll continue fishing."

Then one tried to grab my water bottle and another started going through my tackle bag.  After buttoning everything up, I went back to fishing.  And they continued to bark, and then one tried to grab my tackle bag.

"OK, fine, I'll move somewhere else."

Mr. Whiskers returns!

The dogs followed me as I stumbled through the woods and weeds.  Tried shoo-ing them away and telling them to stay, but they stayed on my trail.  I picked up speed and thought I lost them as I reached one of the other nice spots for fishing in the area, but no, here they came again. Then started barking again.

I had enough at this point and took off as fast as I could (lots of thorny plants here, too).  Going through dense cover hoping the dogs couldn't make it through or get discouraged, they finally lost interest, I guess.

So what I had planned to be a two- to three-hour fishing trip turned into about a 90-minute trip because of somebody's stupid dogs.  I probably won't go back there for awhile.