Well we did our annual trip into George Lake and had a blast with the smallies again. I had a hard time changing from the top water, but the bigger fish seemed to be taking a more subtle approach-most of the trophies were caught on a crawler. 12 m.a.'s caught between 7 guys, the biggest being 19 1/2" (pics to come!). Tons of sight fishing too, and we saw one smallie that was a 20"
for sure. Highlight of the trip though was throwing some laker entrails to the seagulls about thirty feet from our camp. They circled it for 10 minutes, which attracted 10 more, then another five, but none would come near it because we were too close for them I guess. With all the "mine,mine,mine" going on we were beginning to regret our actions. But after about half an hour of this when we weren't really paying attention anymore, we saw one bird flying towards us that dwarfed the rest. Yes Mr.Bald Eagle came whipping around the island at full speed, flew right through all the whiney sh**hawks and I'm sure he said "You clowns have had your chance, now get outta my way!", swooped down and without landing the brakes came on, the talons came out scraped across the rock (which you could hear!) and fish shrapnel was flying everywhere! He then powered back up (you could hear every huge stroke of it's wings!) made a hard left away form us and carried his prize while ten or so seagulls tried to chase him once they figured out what had just happened, the rest just sat there with their mouths open, much like ours were. It was like watching Wild Kingdom from thirty feet away. From the time we spotted it to the time he dissappeared was maybe 20 seconds. I've seen alot of Baldy's in my time, but never that close and never quite like that. Naturally we were sitting there for another hour with camera's in hand before we gave up. We saw him come around the next day but too many other birds were chasing him off and we only got pics of him purched in a tree on our island. The action shot would have been awsome, but the mental picture will remain forever.
