Leesville 2/23..Skunk is lifted..a little

[piper]

Greetings,

Decided to enjoy the beautiful weather a bit and go against my "hiatus" which lasted 2 weeks .. Hit the lake from 1pm-5:30pm.. 
Air temps around 63.. pretty breezy with some serious gusts that finally dies down...i HATE wind.

Water was 10 feet low and heavily stained. All ice was gone. Shad were scattered and took us a little while to find em..but when we finally did holy smokes .. Guess its why they call it fishing..My normal haunts were empty a month ago and now they are full. Found the big schools around 20 foot mark in 30-35 foot of water. 2 throws and done once we found the bigger schools.

Pulled a mixture of sizes : 2 planners 2 downlines. Marked a number of nice fish but no takers until 4:30 when one of the planers was hit (smaller shad). My buddy reeled her in. A 24" striper that weighed 6.6lbs. Very little fight.  Big belly, not sure if they are getting ready for eggs. I was discouraged however as this one had a TON of gill maggots. The first Ive seen this bad. 

Anyways...skunk is gone!

[CorneliaGale]

Nice

[mwardncsu]

Piper - the gill maggots go through cycles. What you see is the egg sacs on the maggots. Basically all the Striper have them now - you just see more or less depending on how developed the egg sacs are at a given time.


Always nice to get out and even better when you avoid the skunk.

[Gator]

The only fish we boated on Saturday was a 29 incher and it had a clean mouth. Nice report Piper and like mward said, nice to avoid the skunk.