Too Much Bait
well here we go, this is the post I wrote up on my board and figured I would share it with everyone here.....
Lake Anna, VA 1/8/06. Water Temp 43.3 first thing in the morning, rose to 44.4 deg by 3pm. Air temp in the low to mid 20's at sunrise but reached 50 by mid afternoon. Birds everywhere from the 208 Bridge to the splits. This made fishing more difficult. There was bait everywhere. So much bait that the stripers were not feeding on anything but the bait. Lots of fish hitting bait on the surface prior to 8am. Pulled jerkbaits, plugs, poppers every topwater bait I had in my tacklebox at them with no strikes. I then pulled a Wild Eye storm with several different retrieves at several different depths. This only resulted in a few strikes and no fish. Spoke with a regular that I had run into on several different occasions while fishing the area. He usually does fairly well. He said the fishing had been very slow due to the excessive amount of bait in the water. He suggested looking for smaller isolated pockets of bait and fishing those, however the smaller pockets I could locate were all being fished by other boats and were too small to infringe on. So I figured best bet was to head back to the bait schools and continue to fish it hard. I took two kids with me 9 and 12 who I rigged with Large Minnows 5-10' below a bobber. Even with live bait in the water the fishing was slow. by 9:30am the two kids had each caught a catfish and had no more bites after that. People around me were jigging spoons and catching catfish and small white perch. I marked fish on the fishfinder all day. from about 15' down to 40' with the majority of the fish between 25 and 35' in 40-42' of water. Seeing that many fish marking close to the bottom I put on a 1/4 oz jighead with a large minnow hooked through the lips and dropped it to the bottom. Within minutes my rod tip started bouncing and I had a fish on. Both kids saw this and decided that they no longer wanted thier bobbers. Channel Catfish off the bottom at 40-42' The place was infested. Since I had kids with me, and we found a way to successfully catch fish I stuck with it so they would have a good time, and continued pulling a pearl wild eye storm through the edges of the baitfish in hopes of a nice striper which I never found. On a not, the guy I spoke with claimed to have 2 fish in the boat when I talked to him before he left. Upon arriving back at the marina he had been there and checked in with 5 stripers (between 2 people) totalling 25lbs with a 7lb 7oz big fish. At least someone caught them. He wouldn't give up what he was using....
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