Thursday evening thru Saturday morning, mostly in Halls Creek Bay near the haystacks, per WW reports. It was my first time in Halls Creek Bay. There are a BUNCH of houseboat beaches in there, therefore a bunch of wakeboats and jet skis from about 10:00-11:00 on. So I got there by 0700-0730, graphed some bait balls and fish laying on the bottom, and some at 20- 40 feet, but didn’t connect unless I dropped the Kastmaster right on their heads. Got one fat striper and one nice SMB which burped up 1 1/2 inch shad. No luck at all trolling at 2.5-3 mph with deep diver at 100 feet out. No boils, some surface splashing which may have been fish feeding on the tiny midges which nearly covered the surface. They certainly weren’t hitting my Zara Spook. I talked to 4-5 other fishermen with similar reports. One fisherman said he went up to GHB from BF and saw no boils there or on the way and caught no fish there. Another trolled Forgotten Canyon and caught nothing until they found that sweeping their rods forward while trolling garnered them a dozen stripers. Seems like if you find them, you do pretty well, but it’s hit or miss.
Thoughts: jigging alone is more difficult to get lazy fish excited vs dropping 2-4 spoons at once. Tuesday’s storm dropped surface temps from 84 to 76 degrees, bodes well for boils to come, but one guy who had been out all week said the storm shut down the bite for now. Full moon- maybe matters, maybe not. And fish seem to be plugged with shad. Rock piles yielded nothing but very small SMB and large sunfish. I think the SM bass are out there eating shad in the middle. So, crawfish forage and SMB populations should be plentiful next year.
Also went down lake and up lake a few miles to hunt SMB. Holy Wow, so much boat traffic Friday & Saturday in the main channel. Huge rollers, washing machine waves, the main channel was unfishable. I was happy just to get my 18 foot Smokercraft home in one piece. Even saw a half dozen Scarab cigarette boats roostertailing by. Seemed like a holiday weekend. I guess everyone was waiting for the cooler weather, like me. Everyone was having a blast, looked like. I did have my fishing license checked for the first time. Nice fellows from UDFW in a stealthy 17 foot runabout, not a patrol boat type. Very handy to have the license downloaded to my phone. All in all, weather was stunning beautiful, didn’t break anything, so had a great few days on the lake. Waiting for boils...
Thoughts: jigging alone is more difficult to get lazy fish excited vs dropping 2-4 spoons at once. Tuesday’s storm dropped surface temps from 84 to 76 degrees, bodes well for boils to come, but one guy who had been out all week said the storm shut down the bite for now. Full moon- maybe matters, maybe not. And fish seem to be plugged with shad. Rock piles yielded nothing but very small SMB and large sunfish. I think the SM bass are out there eating shad in the middle. So, crawfish forage and SMB populations should be plentiful next year.
Also went down lake and up lake a few miles to hunt SMB. Holy Wow, so much boat traffic Friday & Saturday in the main channel. Huge rollers, washing machine waves, the main channel was unfishable. I was happy just to get my 18 foot Smokercraft home in one piece. Even saw a half dozen Scarab cigarette boats roostertailing by. Seemed like a holiday weekend. I guess everyone was waiting for the cooler weather, like me. Everyone was having a blast, looked like. I did have my fishing license checked for the first time. Nice fellows from UDFW in a stealthy 17 foot runabout, not a patrol boat type. Very handy to have the license downloaded to my phone. All in all, weather was stunning beautiful, didn’t break anything, so had a great few days on the lake. Waiting for boils...
