5/14 Thurday-5/21 Best Week since early 2000s!
May 22, 2015 6:12:49 GMT -5
jb4sml, sewelljx, and 2 more like this
Post by striperjohn on May 22, 2015 6:12:49 GMT -5
I will try to keep this short, I'm not a wordsmith like some. Arrived at rental house at 1pm on Thursday and went out fishing ay 4pm. Bait was simply about as easy as I've ever had it all week. One and done just about every day there. Sometimes under a dock light and other times just finding schools. It was all alewives, but some were the biggest I've ever seen on SML. I've just never had any luck getting gizzards in the lower lake. But it didn't seem to matter to the fish.
We caught 7 on bait Thursday evening.
All fish on topwater were caught on topwater baits similar to creek chub striper strike. I make my lures but they're similar to the creek chub. White with silver flakes and a red nose and real bucktail with red thread.
Friday am we caught 17 on topwater and the action was great. I ran into one of the biggest schools on topwater since the day we caught 44 on top a few years ago, I'd say it was about 2 acres of fish breaking and one acre of boats.
Each day we hit large schools on topwater and averaged out about 14 fish each day and about the same on bait in the evenings until Thursday.
Thursday am was "the perfect Striper Topwater day". I had prayed for such a day all week. Started out pouring rain, then got foggy and drizzled. We hit school after school after school. You just had to have a good set of binos to find them in the fog. Mostly in small leeward coves where the fish herded the bait into an area and just blasted them. Thank you to all those fair weather fisherman. We saw Todd and one other boat all morning, he appeared to be catching as well-- ::)of course Todd always seems to be on the fish. In Santee Cooper me and my friends waited on crappy weather to go striper fishing. Loved it then and now!
It may take a week for my thumb to heal, even with the bowlers thumb seal I use, being and old bass fisherman I still lip breaking stripers, faster to get in and out of the boat and catch another one. Huge ones over 15 go in the net.
Sadly we had to leave the rental house at 10 and headed back in at 930. Heading back across the lake we saw three different schools of breaking fish with no boats anywhere around.
Oh yeah to the guy in the black/maroon bass boat that never bothers to look for fish, just follows others--get off your lazy butt and buy yourself a pair of binoculars! If he wasn't following Todd (we saw Todd go by and he'd go by a bit later on 6 different occasions), then he started on me. When I shot off in one direction and stopped and you followed and nothing was there-I was setting you up pal! Okay venting over, I just don't like lazy people!
To summarize, a great week. If you guys think schooling fish are all small then you're fishing the wrong places, we had 10-15lbers with a few much larger fish busting on top about half the time this week. Many fish are still loaded with eggs.
Oh and note to Gator-"the darkside fish just seem to be bigger".
Note to Bigun-Old school my friend, use your logs from 99-2004-worked all week. Old habits die hard with Stripers and Strippers!
We caught 7 on bait Thursday evening.
All fish on topwater were caught on topwater baits similar to creek chub striper strike. I make my lures but they're similar to the creek chub. White with silver flakes and a red nose and real bucktail with red thread.
Friday am we caught 17 on topwater and the action was great. I ran into one of the biggest schools on topwater since the day we caught 44 on top a few years ago, I'd say it was about 2 acres of fish breaking and one acre of boats.
Each day we hit large schools on topwater and averaged out about 14 fish each day and about the same on bait in the evenings until Thursday.
Thursday am was "the perfect Striper Topwater day". I had prayed for such a day all week. Started out pouring rain, then got foggy and drizzled. We hit school after school after school. You just had to have a good set of binos to find them in the fog. Mostly in small leeward coves where the fish herded the bait into an area and just blasted them. Thank you to all those fair weather fisherman. We saw Todd and one other boat all morning, he appeared to be catching as well-- ::)of course Todd always seems to be on the fish. In Santee Cooper me and my friends waited on crappy weather to go striper fishing. Loved it then and now!
It may take a week for my thumb to heal, even with the bowlers thumb seal I use, being and old bass fisherman I still lip breaking stripers, faster to get in and out of the boat and catch another one. Huge ones over 15 go in the net.
Sadly we had to leave the rental house at 10 and headed back in at 930. Heading back across the lake we saw three different schools of breaking fish with no boats anywhere around.
Oh yeah to the guy in the black/maroon bass boat that never bothers to look for fish, just follows others--get off your lazy butt and buy yourself a pair of binoculars! If he wasn't following Todd (we saw Todd go by and he'd go by a bit later on 6 different occasions), then he started on me. When I shot off in one direction and stopped and you followed and nothing was there-I was setting you up pal! Okay venting over, I just don't like lazy people!
To summarize, a great week. If you guys think schooling fish are all small then you're fishing the wrong places, we had 10-15lbers with a few much larger fish busting on top about half the time this week. Many fish are still loaded with eggs.
Oh and note to Gator-"the darkside fish just seem to be bigger".
Note to Bigun-Old school my friend, use your logs from 99-2004-worked all week. Old habits die hard with Stripers and Strippers!
