I unfortunately though am still not am an early morning person so I pulled an all nighter to make sure I was up in time. Got Garrett up early and pulled into the parking lot around 0500. Got the toon set up and walked down to the water and as we were walking down we saw shad jumping around everywhere and stripers were crashing on them right next to the bank. We dropped the toon where it was and you can bet we have spooks tied on. We toss to the boils and Garrett gets a nice swirl, but the fish never takes it. That's all we get though before the fish move off.
We launch the toon and go in the search of more fish. We try trolling around for a bit but as were trolling around we see some more fish crashing on some shad close to the bank. I stick with throwing my spook and Garrett tries a swimbait. Garrett is setting the hook every two seconds until he realizes that its the shad bumping and hitting his swimbait that he is setting the hook on. After a while though I managed to get a swirl on my spook. First swirl the fish missed, second the fish bumped the lure, I got jumpy and swung for a hookset, but I stopped half way through knowing the fish hadn't taken the lure. Luckily I didn't ruin my whole cast, I did two more jerks and boom. Saw that swirl, felt the weight and fish on baby.
I draw first blood on top with this nice keeper.
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Silly me I forgot my tape measure and my scale, so the length and weight goes unknown. Great fish though and that's I need to know.
Shortly after Garrett gets one on his swimbait.
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and another
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and another . . . .
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Hot Damn man swimbait is killing em I got to switch! Sure enough I do and I hook up.
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After that me and Garrett just chased the schools around the banks tossing the swimbaits at them and going to town on these fish.
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our first double
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and our second
We end up getting a total of 4 doubles and close to 10 fish each. After the sun gets high in the sky the fish stop crashing on the surface so we decide to go on the troll. We end up hooking a few but the bite was pretty much dead. With the stripers not bitting any more I decided we would run over and see if we could crank out some black bass.
I get to the cove and sure enough it didn't take long before I started hooking up throwing a shallow diving sexy shad crankbait.
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Trying for a couple of hours I ended up with catching about 8 with my largest being about 4lbs. Poor Garrett just didn't have the right lure the whole time casting to each hole first before me he only managed to catch one short fish and lose one in the 3lb range.
After running out of fishable water for the largemouth we decided to go back on the troll for some more stripers. We find a few more shakers here and there but nothing big.
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sucker swallowed that thing.
Saw Makattak when he was on his lunch break. He told us about some fish possibly being over in the locks just off of Jefferson so we decided to go over there and give it a try.
Nice seeing you and talking to you again Kevin.
We got down there and we saw a few swirls so we knew there were some active fish around. After a while of tossing swimbaits around Garrett and I manage a couple here.
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While we were fishing here I saw a guy come down throwing a gibs minnow for I was assuming salmon. After a short while though Garrett and I saw him catch what we thought was a shaker striper. From far away though we weren't really sure. I saw Garrett had a eye locked on it and he told me it was a shad. We got closer and the guy walked over to us held the fish out and asked us "Hey what kind of fish is this?" He had no idea though. Sure enough though middle of freaking November this guy caught a shad on a freaking gibs minnow. I'll tell you if I didn't see it then I never would have believed it.
After that though we went back on the troll for a few more fish. We ended the day with a total of 26 stripers between the two of us averaging 17-21 inches. Probably at least 15 of the fish being legal keepers. Got off of the water around 1430.
Most amazing day I have ever had at the port striper fishing. Can't wait to get back out there. I'll definatly have to start waking up eariler too to make sure I can get on the early morning top water bite.
Till Next Time Guys
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