Reporting back after trying out Kiser this weekend......
Fished Friday night from probably 730-11pm.....marina and campground end of lake. Water warm and about 1 ft. visibility which was muddier/murkier than I hoped but was expecting based on this thread (thanks guys). Fished the lily pads on south shore mostly, caught 4 largemouth - 2 on frogs and 2 on texas rigged rubber worms. No dinks but none were even 2 lbs.
Camped there at the lake and was back on water by 6am. Again fished east end near campground and marina. Same visibility, worse results.....caught nothing all morning despite good weather and light conditions. 1 strike on a topwater, but I missed the hook set.
I'd describe the fishing as really tough.......below surface the lake has a ton of weeds, hard to keep even texas-rigs from getting snagged, hung up, weedy. For how awesome that lake looks when you pull up, I thought it was going to be red hot for evening/early morning largemouth.....the water clarity and weeds really make it tough fishing. F
One tragically funny scene, which was absolutely not funny at the time, tried a whopper plopper on a few last casts just because. Proceed to bomb this lure out there (you can throw them a long way...they are heavy). Next thing I know, a big blue heron swoops down and is chasing my lure. Despite yelling, reeling, and jerking like crazy - the darn bird catches up to my lure and scoops it up. Total nightmare. Luckily, the bird manages to mostly spit the lure, but not before getting hooked in the face and wing. Poor thing, it's flopping all over the place and these things are like 2-3 feet tall. I didn't want to cut the line because it's surely dead if we do, so I carefully reel it back to the boat and pin it against the boat inside the net. Had to hurt it to get it completely free, but don't think it was permanently injured. It swam back to it's log perch and eventually was able to flap/fly away after a while. It was 10 minutes of chaos - nearly dumped our canoe while it all went down.