We fished from the bottom end of GHB clear up too the river below Striper city 4 days last week. Water temps ranged from 65 the first day at bullfrog down to 62 the last morning way up north on the last morning in the clear or green water. The water in the river was 56 degrees and fairly muddy. Water clarity was around 10 @ bullfrog - 8 to 10 feet in GHB around Ticaboo - 6 feet in Red canyon - 3 to 4 feet around the horn - 2 to 3 feet the rest of the way up till you hit the river. The water in GHB did not seem to be quite as "green" as usual. Once you got up past Castle Butte in got "greener". The water from 4 mile and up was just right for us. Small mouth fishing was slower than usual. We did manage to keep around 80 largest one was just short of 17" had lots in the 14 - 15" range. Caught the most of these using greenish tube jigs. Walleyes were on the humps and points as usual and were relatively healthy. We managed to catch 45 trolling crank baits, a purple colored flicker shad minnow worked the best. Stripers were scattered with a few large schools. We caught them regularly when we tried trolling anything that you could get 15' down. The hot spot for stripers for us was the off of the point of the peninsula just before the mouth of Trachyte. We managed to catch at least one or two each pass. Most of them were in good shape, but we did catch some thin ones. Most of the thin ones were caught on slow moving lures like crappie jigs. We kept 50 or so of them. Did see a little surface activity, it was usually short lived. Just long enough to let us know where they were. There was a considerable amount of surface activity from smaller fish. Upon down sizing our baits we found out they were very small strippers - 5 to 8 inches. The surprise for us was the amount of large crappies we caught trolling for walleyes. We were just a couple short of our legal limit on large crappies. They were 12 to 15 inches with most of them being on the larger end. Once we found them we stopped and caught more on Berkley gulp 3" swim tail minnows in pearl white. Managed to catch around 300 fish - cleaned just over 200. Caught 10 species -Stripers - Crappies - Large and small mouth bass Channel and yellow mud cats. walleyes, bluegills, green sunfish, and a gizzard shad that hit a 4" flicker shad. I had snagged these before but never caught one in the mouth. Would have guessed it to be around 2.5 pounds. It put up a respectable fight.
Any one going up north needs to watch out for low water hazards. The worst one is the large flat just before Scorup which is about MM 127 to 128. It was at 3.5 feet deep last week. The flat is directly in a straight line from the last point on the west straight across from castle butte and the point at the horn. For those of us that run a straight line from point to point will run right into this flat. It is at least 150 yards form the shore. To make it worse, there is a MM bouy that is right on it edge of the flat in 8' of water when the wind is blowing out of the west. Stay over to the west side when running up lake in this area. Another spot to watch for is a rock spire that is in 45 feet of water in 4 mile. This spot is in right in the middle of the last round bay of water just past the round rock island before the canyon narrows down, and was at 4' when we found it looking for stripers. A lot of the MM bouys are on the bank, and some of them have lights on them. There is one of these about 40' up the bank just below Castle Butte. It has a green light on it that works.
Plan on going back around Thanksgiving. Will have to refind the fish after the big draw down. Don't understand why they do that at this time of the year?
This was a special trip being I took an old friend that has terminal cancer and his buddy. I had fished with him once about 25 years ago. He said that he wanted to go one more time. He and his buddy both told me that it was by far the best fishing trip that they had ever had. Bittersweet
Any one going up north needs to watch out for low water hazards. The worst one is the large flat just before Scorup which is about MM 127 to 128. It was at 3.5 feet deep last week. The flat is directly in a straight line from the last point on the west straight across from castle butte and the point at the horn. For those of us that run a straight line from point to point will run right into this flat. It is at least 150 yards form the shore. To make it worse, there is a MM bouy that is right on it edge of the flat in 8' of water when the wind is blowing out of the west. Stay over to the west side when running up lake in this area. Another spot to watch for is a rock spire that is in 45 feet of water in 4 mile. This spot is in right in the middle of the last round bay of water just past the round rock island before the canyon narrows down, and was at 4' when we found it looking for stripers. A lot of the MM bouys are on the bank, and some of them have lights on them. There is one of these about 40' up the bank just below Castle Butte. It has a green light on it that works.
Plan on going back around Thanksgiving. Will have to refind the fish after the big draw down. Don't understand why they do that at this time of the year?
This was a special trip being I took an old friend that has terminal cancer and his buddy. I had fished with him once about 25 years ago. He said that he wanted to go one more time. He and his buddy both told me that it was by far the best fishing trip that they had ever had. Bittersweet
