Morning Striper Skunk, Afternoon Alewife Blitz - 6/22/14

Connecticut River Stripers (or lack thereof) 

On the Water: 5:30 - 8:00

Air Temperature: 54-63

Water Temperature: 68-70

Water Clarity: Clear/Stained

Skies: Mostly Sunny, occasional clouds

Wind: 0-3 Mph E

Barometric Pressure: 29.96 - 29.99"

To put it bluntly, the river was just plain awful today.  In the two and a half hours Josh and I were out there, we spooked 6 or 7 fish, had a couple follows, one swirl and one hit.  The stripers must have known that I was coming today, because every time I show my face in their presence, they seem to vanish.

This pretty much sums up our morning on the river.

Secret (not so secret) Lake

On the water: 8:30am - 3:00pm

Air Temperature: 64 - 73

Water Temperature: 74 - 77

Water Clarity: Mostly Clear with a slight brown stain

Skies: Sunny in the morning, Clouds rolled in around 12:30

Wind: 0-6 Mph E (until 12:30), 6-9 Mph S (after 12:30)

Barometric Pressure: 30.00 - 29.99"

Josh and I wanted to try somewhere new today, so we agreed upon this location for a couple reasons: The lake does not allow boats with gas engines, so we wouldn't have to worry about pleasure boaters, and it is fairly secluded, so we figured we would pretty much have the lake to ourselves.  Well we were dead wrong about the latter.  There were many pleasure kayakers, some obnoxious people on the "beach", and some fellow anglers.  The parking lot was nearly full when we arrived, not what we expected.

Anyways, when we got on the lake, we started paddling up the shady side of the lake, just surveying depth, structure and cover, making note of spots we wanted to come back to when the wind pushed us back.  We fished for a while without any action aside from the few hits Josh had on the Panhead jig.

I finally was able to land the first fish of the day on a Cobra Bait Deadbolt in less than a foot of water.  It was about a pound and a half largemouth, most likely guarding fry.  A short while later, I heard a big splash near Josh, and he informed me that he just had a 5 pound + fish jump and spit the hook on the jig.  We started seeing some fish breaking the surface out in the middle of the lake, and we quickly figured out that it was bass going after the schools of alewife.  The bass were pushing the schools out of deep water and up onto large flats, going from 30+ feet all the way up to 6 feet, where they were feasting for much of the morning.  We were able to catch a good amount of largemouth during the blitz, all of these fish were caught on Zoom Super Flukes.  

Once the action had slowed down, I had to try to figure something else out.  I tied on a rainbow shad colored Keitech swing impact on to a 1/4 oz Strike King swimbait jig head.  I would cast out and allow it to sink to the bottom, and then reel in at a slow to medium speed.  I was retrieving my swimbait, and it felt like I reeled into a brick wall, after a few seconds, the fish came to the surface, jumped, shook his head, and spit the hook.  This fish was a GIANT!  After about 30 seconds of sulking I went back to the swimbait and caught a few decent fish, all in 18-24 ft of water.  One of which I caught trolling while paddling to the next spot, which surprised me a bit.

I moved across to the other side of the lake, and was able to grind out one more bass on the swimbait, and missed a couple on a drop shot.

Between the 2 of us, we caught 11 bass, 7 on the super fluke, 3 on the Keitech, and 1 on a deadbolt, the biggest being 3+.  For this being a new lake, and not being quite what we expected, I think we did an okay job. New water is always tough.  But the overall size of the fish in this lake was well above average for CT.  The smallest fish was a pound and a half, the biggest we saw was well over 5.