Fishing has been hot and cold for us over the past few weeks. We’ve been getting out early in the morning and then again in the evening, but we’ve not been out a lot. I haven’t been on the north end of the lake for some time now but I’m finding a striper or two just inside the mouths of some of our south end creeks. Getting them to bite is the biggest obstacle right now. From what I can tell they are feeding on small stuff but even a small bucktail doesn’t work at times with these fish. The water temps are in the mid to lower 60’s as I write this and fully expect more and more stripers to show up in our south end creeks as the water temps get down in the 50’s. I’ve only used live bait once in the past few months and I’m finding it quite a challenge to catch stripers with any regularity on artificials. Late last week I had big stripers crashing bait all around my boat off and on for over an hour but the only thing I got them to hit was a small bucktail. The big striper smoked my little spinning reel with 6 lb test. The striper tore off with the jig so fast my drag couldn’t keep up with the fish and the line snapped after 100 feet. After that, they wouldn’t hit anything I threw and I threw the kitchen sink at them.

Lisa and I are still catching bass by trolling crankbaits. On Monday evening we caught 6 nice bass trolling in the back of Bald Ridge. We’ve been using deep diving lipped crankbaits that dive down about 20 feet at 2.5 mph and running 75-100 feet behind the boat.

Other than that, right now there’s not much more to report but I will be out this weekend again and I’ll post my progress and another report.

Jim