As I suggested in Part One of this article, when fishing at Bienville Plantation in north Florida every cast creates the possibility of a lunker catch, but even the normal bites are consistently in the two pound range. Brian Clark had especially good luck last November. In his first ten minutes on the water, he caught this seven pounder on a crankbait.

A few minutes later, casting to the same spot, I snagged my own seven pounder using the watermelon red Tiki Stick.

The moss can be annoying, especially when fishing with an exposed hook, but sometimes the weeds hold good-sized bass.

The trouble is definitely worth it when you pull in bass like these:

When they’re available, the cabins around the Lake are the most convenient place to stay the night before fishing. They’re nothing fancy, but they’re comfortable and have a good table for playing cards.

When they're booked, you have to go to one of the motels in White Springs or Jasper, and some of which get sketchy.

In the afternoon, the bite shuts down. Between eleven am and four pm, all you get is a sunburn. Even in winter and spring, all the action comes in the morning and afternoons. Summer’s even worse, with hundred plus temperatures driving the bass deep and unresponsive. When this happens, the best afternoon bet is the Jai-Alai/Poker Room on Interstate 75 about 15 minutes from the Plantation. They have a $2 Texas hold 'em game and Jai-Alai tournaments running most afternoons. Or you can go down the interstate about twenty minutes to Lake City and see a movie.

Or you can stick around the lake and see if a summer storm comes through. That happened to me and Rob last year. We caught some nice fish quickly, but then the storm turned into a downpour with lightening, so we had to head back to Dublin early.

Our last trip there, Rob caught a bass that up-chucked his last, partially-digested meal just as he hit the plastic worm. If you look carefully at the bottom of the picture, you can see the baitfish flying into the boat.

When we went in February Rob and I caught nineteen, with Rob catching the biggest and the most bass. His heaviest weighed in at around five pounds with several other good ones.

In March the fishing picked up a lot. I've been twice this month and each time, we could see large bass guarding their beds at the ends and edges of cattail points near deep clear water.

On our last trip, Eric edged out his brother Jordan by one ounce for the big-fish bet with this 4 lb 12 oz bass:

Alligators are common at Bienville -- in the daytime they sleep on islands and as the sun goes down you can see their eyes all over the water.

The day Erik, Jordan, and I went, we pulled in a total of fifty-seven bass, almost all weighing two pounds or more. The previous week, Hunter, Erik, and I did pretty good too, although Hunter's early attempts to use anything other than the wacky worm left him with only five for the day. Here are some of our catches:

More fishing pictures:

Two Springtime Sunsets over Lake 14 at Bienville Plantation

Link to Bienville's website.

(AvidAngler.net is an independent site not associated with Bienville Plantation.)