1/21/17 - Meet & Greet Fishing

[mwardncsu]

Weather: Foggy & very overcast, temps in the upper 40's, no wind to start then picking up to about 5 mph from NW mid-morning
Water: 48-49, visibility of a few feet
Techniques: Pulling free-lined planers with gizzards - dollar-bills to 14" mongos along the bank - a few free-lined planers with dollar-bills on the deep-side

Mike (Gator), Tyler (BentRod) and I headed out about 7am and decided to try a different section of lake with the bait The overcrowded tank full of bait happily made it through the night which was a happy sight.



We headed out to a stretch of rocky bank and set out a spread. Didn't take long to find the fish were home and hungry - eating both the big & smaller baits. We worked up and down that stretch of bank for several passes till the action dropped off. Picked up 4 there and missed a few - with the fish in the 10-14 lb range - 28"-34".

















We moved on up to a another spot to pull and were rewarded with a nice 16 lb fish that went 36"



Pulled for a very long stretch after that without any action - the wind had picked up and it got cold and we felt like the bite had died off.... around 1pm we decided to pack up and head back down to the previous stretch - of course as I'm reeling in one of the boards we finally get some action on a near-by board but it didn't commit. So we moved back down and pulled the opposite side bank of where we had worked before and Tyler managed to land a citation largemouth (22") - but we didn't take a pic of that one...... Tyler did pick up a another striper that was 10-12 lb range.



We crossed over and pulled the stretch again where the 36" came from - I was on deck when a board just buried and it was a good fish - good fight - and brought an 18 lber / 37" citation to the boat! He did have to be convinced a bit of his ability to be a citation, but he qualified by length









We didn't have much more time but we pulled a bit more bank till we had to pack up and head off to the Meet & Greet to meet up with 25 or so of the local forum folks for a late lunch and some good discussion.


After lunch we picked up a few stragglers (Yam and ShadSlinger) and headed back out to fill till dark - we tried some different waters that were close to the location we were for lunch - which turned out to be a bad call - we should have made the run back to where we were for the morning as we found nothing but barren waters in the afternoon run, but we had some good laughs in the process. Good day overall with 7 stripers to the boat with 4 over 30" (a 30, 34, 36 & 37), and even a citation large-mouth. I'll take this fishing in late January any day!

[mwardncsu]

[jt]

Well done guys, great pictures and video, very entertaining. Never gets old looking at these monsters
Mward, do you do anything special to keep gizards alive overnight? Last time I was there I actually had to add a little bit of warm water to keep some alewives overnight because it was so cold outside. Of course the reverse in summer. Do you use shad-keeper? Thanks again for the report

[mwardncsu]

Jan 22, 2017 22:05:30 GMT -5 jt said:

Mward, do you do anything special to keep gizards alive overnight? Last time I was there I actually had to add a little bit of warm water to keep some alewives overnight because it was so cold outside. Of course the reverse in summer. Do you use shad-keeper? Thanks again for the report

They are easy to keep this time of year with the water as cool as it is - if anything you sometimes need to get a little warmer water into the tank - or if its going to be VERY cold overnight put a heat-lamp over the tank to keep it from getting too cold. When you 1st catch some, especially from down deep, they tend to cold-shock like you see in the pics in my report from the previous day - they will lay there on their side or upside down but eventually after 15 or 20 min or so they will come around.

The main thing is good aeration & filtration - getting the slime out. A lot of folks put them in a bucket or tank and let them slime off before transferring to their main tank. I've never done this mainly out of laziness of dealing with a tub to let them slough off in - they go straight into my main tank and then I keep an eye on the filter. I leave the scale basket in the tank when catching bait as it does a good job helping to catch the slime - and rinses out easily enough with the raw-water wash-down pump on my boat. I also use "Ehfi-fix" material - looks a bit like Easter-egg grass but is stiffer. This last a VERY long time and is great at catching the slime. Then I use Poly-fil based filter material.

As far as in the tank - I basically just use salt. In warmer water and heavy loads I'll use Prime, and off and on I'll use some baking soda - which basically helps stabilize the pH. I don't use ShadKeeper - though have in the past - some guys swear by it - I believe its mostly salt and some blue food coloring - but likely also some other buffering agents.

ShadCrack by Striper Soup is good stuff to use as well - it is an all-in-one supplement (use it instead of salt) - it's developed by a guy that catches & sells bait for a living and knows his stuff about bait. It has some special ingredients in it that help calm bait when they stressed and packed densely. I think its more helpful again in warmer temps than this time of year. Cold water holds so much oxygen it's hard to screw them up right now.

[fatdaddy]

Wow Sweet right there

[mwardncsu]

By the way JT - good questions - I don't post up my reports just for my chagrins - though they do serve value for me historically to go back to over time. I try to make them fun with action pics as well as fish pics - but also put useful info in them - in addition to the written part there are usually valuable things you can pick up on if you pay attention closely to the pics (and I'm not just talking about trying to figure out where we were).

But it's the follow-on discussion that is always the most valuable for all - and most enjoyable part of it for me as well..... A lot of times when there are no replies to these reports I sometimes wonder if there is value in posting them.....

[jt]

Thanks for all the info mward, got more than I expected! I will have to check out the product that you just discussed there. You are right that It does suck when nobody responds to your post, I've seen it happen here. Not even a thanks! But people get busy and maybe a lot of the board does not have automatic notifications to their cell phones, who knows?
I went fishing in Lake Anna last weekend and the only bait I could catch were threadfin shad. No Blue Back herring but I did not have the time to go hunting for gizzards. They were clouds and clouds of them but they were all 25 feet and deeper. I had a hard time catching any with my net and then I landed one good shot and pulled up 200. In my opinion out of all of these baits, they are the most tender.
I also successfully hooked up my 12.2 inch Samsung Tablet Pro to my 7 inch HDS 7 through the Go free app. I will give a full report after the coming weekend when I can hopefully try it out when there's sunny weather outside. Otherwise it worked great. Take care

[Jason54]

Great report! Congratulations on your first citation of 2017! Looks like you guys had a blast.

[coheasion]

Awesome report Mike! Congrats on that citation!