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New Tackle Design

Well, I’m on lock-down here at the house. I’m nursing a cold and some kind of deadly lung funk this weekend. The boss says I have to stay in so I’ve been down in the shop and out at the pool for the last 2 days on a R&D (Research and Development) mission. Since I can’t chase stripers this weekend I’ve designed a surprise for little Mr. topwater striper when I get out of lock down. Since the topwater stripers are whacking the 1/2 ounce bucktail, I’ve decided to double my odds and I’ve created “The Double Bucktail Rig”. Check out the video I made of my newest creation and stand by for the field testing results next week. These rigs are available on my website.

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Friday 11-19 Trip

Got out this morning with Mike D from the Oakwood club. I met Mike a few weeks back when he bought some tackle, and I found out he’s an old retired Navy guy like me. I invited Mike to go out and check a few of my early winter holes. It’s still a little early but we managed a few fish. We got over a nice school and I hooked up on a downline and he broke me off. When we got over the school with the planer boards Mike brought one in off of a large trout on a planer board. We left that hole after a while and ran north to pulled a long flat. I thought maybe we could get one decent fish off the flat and darned if Mike didn’t catch another one on another big trout on a planer board. It was a good morning on the water. We just fished a few creeks from Browns Bridge to Gainesville Creek. All in all it was a slow morning but nice to get out after making tackle for the past 2 weeks. Here’s a picture of one of Mikes fish.

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Video of setting up the planer board spread

Here’s a short video of my planer board set up. Something not mentioned in the video is my trolling motor speed, generally it varies from .3 mph to 1+ mph while pulling planers. Some baits will get a bit stressed at higher speeds so I’m usually moving pretty slow.
Another note is the length of line between the planer board and the bait. If I’m fishing in shallow water with big baits I usually don’t go any further back than 10 feet behind the board. When fishing open water like down the middle of a deeper creek, I’ll go back as far as 80-100 feet behind the board.

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Our West Point trip

My Dad and I just got back from our annual trip to West Point. We had a really good time and caught plenty of fish. We stayed at the Highland Marina floating cabin and the accommodations were great as usual. Bait netting was no problem with the Hydro-glow at the cabin and in the back of the creek at Highland. We netted alot of gizzards and threadfins with some very large hybrid threadfins mixed in. I hadn’t netted any hybrid threads in 3-4 years but we got a bunch on this trip.

Yesterday was pretty slow and we only caught around 8 fish between the morning and afternoon. The lake was down about 4 feet and they didn’t generate yesterday. I really wanted to get my dad on some numbers so I used a technique with the netted bait that we used last year that worked out great. We found some large schools of gizzards in the back of Highland in 2 feet of water. We filled the net with gizzards with one throw and filled 2 five gallon buckets with 3-4 inch gizzards in water and put 6-8 dozen in the bait tank. We headed to the large flat we planned to fish and with the wind blowing into the flat, we released the gizzards in the buckets across the mouth of the flat and let the wind push the released gizzards across the flat.  We waited about 30 minutes and it was on. We guessed we caught 30-40 stripers this morning on the flat. Most of the fish we caught were on downlines on the bottom in 25 feet of water. Most of the fish were between 3-6 pounds with the biggest striper around 10 pounds and a hybrid that was very close to 8. After the morning my dad was pretty much wore out so we grabbed some lunch and headed back home. My dad doesn’t have to many fishing trips left at 71 and smoking like a chimney so it’s really great to get him out and put him on a few fish.

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No fishing this week

Sorry fella’s, I’m getting everything ready for a 3 day trip to West Point next week with my dad so I’m doing some service and repairs on my boat this week. I’ll be back on Lanier after our WP trip and hopefully find a few fish for the National Championship on Lanier.

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Fishing on Saturday 9 October

I got out with my good friend Brett W on an invite to fish in the Lanier Striper Club tournament. We started the day slow trolling leadcore and downriggers just looking for active schools. We marked plenty of fish up on points, but most were inactive fish and small groups of Spotted bass. We finally found a decent school of fish in the back of a large cove area. We trolled a set-up of 2 leadcore and two downriggers through the school without a sniff. We quickly turned around, brought in the trolling gear and dropped the herring down and tried power reeling the herring to no avail. Brett had a big 2 ounce Bucktail jig with a 6 inch swim bait tied on and I had a ounce and a half with a 5 inch swim bait. We both dropped down past the school and climbed the ladder with the jig stopping it every couple of feet. That was the key. We both hooked up at the same time using this method but mine broke off. Probably a 30-40 pounder. lol 

The action was fast as we managed 2 good keeper fish before the school moved on. These two fish were enough to win the tournament.

Guys, when you get over a school like we did, sometimes you have to act fast because a lot of these schools are moving quickly and you only get one good shot at getting a good fish or two. Just like a lot of schooling stripers, the larger fish will generally be below the smaller fish so dropping a heavy 2+ ounce bait gets it down fast into the target area for bigger fish. In our case, we dropped all the way to the bottom and worked it up from there.

One last thing I wanted to add is that after the tournament the club meets for lunch at a little restaurant in the back of Flowery Branch. It was a lot of fun with a great bunch of guys! I saw a lot of laughs and a lot of smiling faces. That’s what it’s all about.

Good Fishing!

Jim

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Fishing report for 27 Sept. till 3 Oct.

I got out this morning with a friend to do a little planer board testing and scouting a little north of Browns Bridge. Long story short; not much to report to the north. The best we could do with the planer boards was a few small spots and a 4 pound catfish on a weighted planer. After dinking around that area for a couple of hours we came back down to the 2 mile chute. We marked a nice school of larger fish just to the back side of a point but couldn’t get any to commit to the trout and bluebacks. We moved further south and found some really nice schools of stripers around the mouth and inside 6 mile. Again, we got right over the schools and no takers. It wasn’t for a lack of trying, we power reeled, fished above them, below them, in them and around them. We did everything but troll through them. I left all my trolling gear at home for this trip. I was commited to live bait. I kick myself for not bringing the u-rigs for these groups of fish.

We headed back to the dock around lunchtime and called it a day. No stripers were boated today. It was one of those days that the fish we were on were not really active fish. The water temps were in the upper 70’s this morning and from what I’ve seen, a few fish are probably moving a bit north. I think that the front coming through this weekend will cool the water a bit more and scatter a few schools. We saw very few topwater fish north of Browns Bridge and not much topwater to speak of by the time we got to 6 mile. My guess is that planer boards and free lines early, followed by downlines and trolling once the sun comes up. There are still good groups of fish on the south end that can be caught trolling. We did see a few larger fish sitting on points early but couldn’t get any to hit the trout yet. All in all, we’re starting to see signs of a fall pattern with fish being shallow and on the surface chasing bait early in the morning and late in the evening. Topwater baits should work well early in the morning and late in the evening. I also like using 1/2 to 3/4 ounce bucktail in light or off white colors for surfacing stripers at dusk.

Good Fishing!

Jim

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The Bucktail

I’ve often said that if I had to pick one piece of tackle to catch one fish on any given day, that piece of tackle would have to be a bucktail. An important key to successful fishing is trusting your bait. Ever since my first striper on a bucktail I’ve slowly built a trust in it. The bucktail and I go back to my days in California in the early eighties fishing the headwaters of the California Aquaduct. When water was released from the many locks of the Aquaduct the stripers would move to the headwaters. I was strictly a cut-bait fisherman at the time. Cut-baiting has it’s place, but slinging a half cut anchovie into swift current wasn’t a very successful way to target stripers in the Aquaduct. One afternoon while cut bait fishing near a headwater gate, an old man pulled up and as I watched, he began casting a jig into the headwaters of a half opened lock. Within minutes he was bringing in a nice 5 pounder. I walked over and looked at his bait of choice and found that it was about a 2 ounce chipmonk bucktail. Needless to say, within a week I was back out there chunking a bucktail on my spinning gear.

I caught my first bucktail striper in that aquaduct and started using it in more striper lakes. I discovered that the bucktail worked well for casting to a single breaking fish or casting into a school of feeding stripers. I used my bucktail at Lake Mead in Nevada combat sight fishing schools under birds. I even used the bucktail in the upper Klamoth River in Ore for trophy trout. It came along with me to the fertile marshes of Louisiana for redfish and speckled trout. If you look at my boat today, you’ll see a spinning rod with a bucktail tied on just waiting to catch the next breaking or feeding fish.

One of the reasons the bucktail has been a successful bait for me is that I trust it to get the job done. If I’m casting to a single breaking fish with my bucktail, my strategy is to trick the fish into thinking the bucktail is the fleeing bait the fish is after. The easiest way to accomplish this is to cast the jig well past the fish and then quickly retrieve the jig into the zone the fish is in. A lot of times the fish will strike out at the jig thinking it’s the bait he’s after. Timing is key to this strategy. You have to get the bait to the fish when he’s what I call “lit up”, or in the feeding mode. For a group or school of feeding fish the success rate for the bucktail goes up and timing is less critical. In the case of a feeding school, the water around the school is generally chaotic with fleeing bait fish. By burning the bucktail through the feeding area, the bucktail immulates another fleeing bait. It’s just a matter of one of the feeding fish being fooled by the bucktail.

With fall right around the corner, it’s just a matter of time before we start seeing surfacing fish feeding on schools of bait. This is the perfect time to keep a bucktail tied on and ready to go. Just remember to try and emulate the fleeing bait and above all, trust your bucktail.

Jim