As I wrote about in my column yesterday in The Roanoke Times, I got out late last week for a day of fishing with my buddy Alfie Hammerstrom.

We were hoping to find some yellow perch and crappies at Holliday Lake (aka Holiday Lake), but never did get on them. We did catch some bluegills, which tells you just how warm this winter has been. Normally those things are quiet until at least April.

I know Ralph Barton, who guided his son Chris (with a 6-p0under!) and girlfriend Jan into these great Smith Mountain Lake largemouth bass on March 11, isn’t the only one getting out there and putting fish in the boat.

Let’s get some reports, folks!

Salem’s John Crews had a good first day in the season-opener for the Bassmaster Elite Series on Florida’s St. Johns River.

Crews is in eighth with a 5-fish limit weighing 19 pounds, 9 ounces.

J. Todd Tucker, who had a pair of 8-pounders caught bed fishing, leads with 24 pounds.

Full results are available on the Bassmaster web site.

The state record fish committee has approved Dublin angler Rod Kegley’s incredible spotted bass from Claytor Lake as a new state record for the species.

Kegley caught the 4-pound, 7-ounce fish last Saturday while casting an Alabama rig around a flat in the lake’s Peak Creek arm.

More details about the catch can be found in my Tuesday column from The Roanoke Times.

I just got a comment on another post from a fisherman who is wondering where around Roanoke to buy minnows. He mentioned Sportsman’s Liquidation, which carries them but has a hard time keeping them in stock. I can verify this as I went by there last night and they didn’t have any smalls, which I want for a yellow perch trip I plan to take on Thursday.

I know the place on the New River under the I-81 bridge (The Sportsman?) has them. But anywhere else around Roanoke?

I just got off the phone with Dublin’s Rod Kegley, who caught this big spotted bass on Saturday at Claytor Lake.

The fish weighed 4 pounds, 7 ounces — well over the existing state record of 3 pounds, 10 ounces. The species and weight were verified by DGIF biologist John Copeland, so it seems likely Kegley’s record application will have no problems.

Does anyone care to guess what Kegley caught this fish on? And if you already know, you can’t play. Of course, anyone who has been paying attention to bass fishing for the last couple of months can probably guess.

Southern California is dotted with deep, cool, clear lakes that produce some monster largemouth bass.

Part of they key is their diet, which includes a lot of stocked trout. The lakes are also really clear, so tricking the bass is anything but easy.

Well, it seems like we might have something like that going on here.

My feature on today’s Roanoke Times Outdoors page was about an 11-pound, 4-ounce largemouth bass pulled from little Douthat Lake on March 1. Chris Vess of Nicelytown, a little community near Clifton Forge, caught the fish on a tiny Mepps trout spinner and 4-pound-test line.

Douthat is stocked with trout. It’s got some bass, obviously, and I would suspect the bigger ones chow down on trout. This bass just looks like one of those fat California toads. I mean, it’s a relatively modest 23 1/2 inches long, but has a girth of 21 inches. Wow!

But it’s also usually really clear, so the bass are pretty tough.

As word of this catch spreads, I suspect it will draw some extra fishing attention over the next couple of months.

I have been fishing in Virginia for a long time and have never caught an 8-pound largemouth. My biggest was 6 1/2 to 7. It was 23 inches long but was nowhere near this fat.

How many of you have caught an 8-pounder in Virginia? Anyone here get one over 10 pounds? I’m betting very few of you, though maybe some of you Briery Creek devotees have. Fish that size are just extremely rare this far north.

A couple years ago I read a book about a fisherman who thought the perfect job would be to open a tackle shop. So he did it, and found out what it really meant. It turns out when you own a tackle shop, you spend all your time in the tackle shop, instead of fishing.

Over the winter, that point got driven home to Mike Snead, owner of the Virginia Outdoorsman in Moneta. Snead had closed the shop for the winter, with plans to move the business next door in the strip mall, into a space from which Snead runs a contract postal facility.

As I wrote in my column this morning in The Roanoke Times, Snead tasted freedom, and he liked it. Saying he wants to spend more time with family, and more time actually fishing instead of just talking fishing, he won’t reopen the shop.

Now, I’m guessing if the shop was raking in massive profits, this might have been a more difficult decision. But we all know that running a small business is tough. Always has been. But now it’s tougher than ever.

I appreciated Mike’s insight into fishing conditions at the lake, which he had to get largely from conversations with customers instead of through personal experience. While I’ll miss that info, I’m glad for Mike that he’ll be getting to spend more time on the water himself now.

I fished today at Lake Moomaw with long-suffering fishing buddy Alfie Hammerstrom (to my right) and new-suffering fishing buddy John Kemp.

It was 42 when we got to the lake. That was also the best water temp we could find.

We started out drifting for trout, moved to trolling for trout, then started casting jerkbaits for bass and pickerel. Alfie caught a 2.5-pound largemouth, which finally broke the ice.

It started to rain, but we all had rain gear.

We had some good laughs, such as when, while watching me haplessly flail with my lure retriever to unhook Alfie’s snagged Rapala X-rap, John  said, “Prepare to deploy the lure retriever retriever.”

It wasn’t needed as moments later I snapped Alfie’s line.

Then it started to thunder. That was that.

Lake Moomaw has been a cruel mistress to me. She is so beautiful, and occasionally spectacularly productive. But then she treats me like dirt.

I can’t stay away.

I haven’t written a post in a few days, in part because Friday I was out all day fishing, then went straight to work in the office until after midnight.

Then I just took the weekend off, other than a few comments to that last post on Sunday hunting.

This week I’m working on a piece on winter fishing. I did something a few weeks ago on winter bass fishing tournaments, but this will be on the various species available to anglers during the colder months, as well as some techniques for catching them.

This was the only yellow perch my buddy Tom Maynard and I managed to scare up on Friday from Claytor Lake. We did get a few walleyes, however, which we really had to work for.

We’re eating them tonight, and they will be tasty.

I’ll be chewing on something else for a while. On the way back to the ramp my boat’s engine died. One second it was running like a top, the next it was buzzing to a stop. It didn’t take me too long to figure out the problem: out of gas. Tom, being a fishing guide who likes things in order, had sent me an email a few days earlier with a long checklist of things. They ranged from having enough lifejackets to making sure my fishing license was valid. One item was to make sure I had enough gas. “You didn’t even read it, did you?” he asked. “Of course I read it,” I replied. “I just didn’t heed your advice.” Tom said the only reason he sent all that to me was “I have done all of those things myself.”

Fortunately we had only about 2 miles back to the ramp so were able to get in on the trolling motor.

Another one for the “This happened to me while boating” file.

Anyway, back to fishing. What are some other fish you all like to target this time of year? Favorite spots? Tactics? I’m not looking for any super secrets, just basic info.

Thanks in advance.

My feature on today’s Outdoors page in The Roanoke Times was about some of the region’s die-hard bass anglers, a few dozen of whom have been hitting Smith Mountain Lake every Saturday for tournament out of Smith Mountain Lake State Park.

Those guys have been catching some great fish the past couple of months. This is Douglas Eubank with last week’s lunker pot winner — a 6-pound, 13-ounce largemouth.

When I heard about the tournament series I thought, “Man, those guys are hard core.”

They are hard core. But they haven’t really had to be this year because the weather has been so mild.

I think it was Danny Towe who said to me that the weather was actually colder in the early fall than it has been the past couple of months.

The last tournament in the series is tomorrow. It’s going to be cold and windy, one of those days that could be really miserable.

We’ve all had them, right?

I think my most miserable “fishing” day was during the 2008 Bassmaster Classic on Lake Hartwell in South Carolina. I was the media observer on the boat with Virginian Jeff Freeman, who had qualified through the BASS Federation Nation. It was rainy and about 33 degrees. And I wasn’t fishing. If you think fishing in brutally wet and cold weather sucks, try NOT FISHING in brutally wet and cold weather.

Who can top that one?