Fishing Near Skyscrapers

A quick, but valuable, story. The other day my father, visiting from Tennessee, and I fished at Prairie View near Bennington and Summit Lake near Tekamah. At Prairie View, a lake I had earlier electrofished and seen many nice largemouth, we found these same largemouth on the rip-rap throughout the lake, the patch of flooded trees in the lake’s northwest corner, and along the north edge. Spinnerbaits, Baby -1’s, and topwater scum frogs were the lures of choice. We caught several nice fish doing nothing more than casting near the vegetation and fishing these lures back to the boat. After a few hours of fishing, we caught somewhere between 25 and 30.

After lunch, we did the same thing at Summit, but ran into an even better scenario there. Fishing no more than the shallow cove near both boat ramps, we fished all shallow lures, and were in a little bit better class of fish than at Prairie View, with most of the bass averaging between 1.5 and 2 pounds. We caught around 20 there.  

My reasons for this short fishing recap are two-fold: 1) there is excellent fishing near Omaha

A Summit Lake largemouth

, a sentiment I will add to next spring in my NEBRASKAland article tentatively titled “Close to the Metro,” and 2) it sometimes doesn’t take a whole lot of work to catch good fish at these places.  

We were home in the mid afternoon, had caught near 50 largemouth, and had spent more time talking about hunting and fishing than worrying how we were going to catch our next fish. All and all, a very great day.

 JK