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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

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Fishing the week of 20-26 September

Well, this morning was interesting. I was suppose to meet a couple of friends at the ramp this morning to go out in their boat and try a little trolling. I hadn’t heard from them by 9 am so I decided to drive on down to the lake and wait for the call. As I pulled up to the ramp I saw a small school of larger stripers just having a blast busting bait on top; And right out in front of the ramp no less! I jumped out of the truck and grabbed the rod I had in the back. I had a bucktail tied on and thought maybe I could catch one on my spinning gear from the dock. By the time I got the rod out and headed to the dock, they were moving back out. I got to the dock and just couldn’t get that 1/2 ounce bucktail out far enough to get at the school. None the less, it was a great site to see the stripers up on top. My buddy pulled up in his boat to pick me up and said they had just caught a nice 15 pounder on a freelined herring straight out the back. That was another good sign. Catching fish on freelines means that planer boards will probably work also. We set out to try some trolling and hit a few spots where I’d been catching them on leadcore and downriggers. We tied up a couple of bucktail trollers and tried a few areas that held fish down deep. We had 1 taker that came unbuttoned. He hit the Blueback troller hard and peeled about 50 feet and let go. We checked a few other areas and went back to where they had caught the 15 pounder earlier. The fish had moved on. After a couple of hours of looking and trolling the leadcore I headed back to the house. It sounds to me like there was an early bite and the leadcore trolling has slowed a bit. The water temp was 81-82. I don’t expect those temps to hold much longer with a stronger front coming through in a couple of days. Hopefully by late next week, there will be even more topwater and cooler water temps.