"Joshuall" wrote in message
. ..

Last week my brother in law and I fished the Mississippi River Pool 18. We
caught a few decent fish in the limited time we had, but here's my
question. We found bait fish on all the major main river points and over
much of the shore lines. On the last point there were literally schools of
bait fish for about a fifty yard diameter. We could see larger fish
feeding on them, but couldn't get a bite no matter what we threw. I
suppose the bigger fish were just gorging themselves at that location and
nothing would have been successful, but I wondering what we could have
done at other venues on the river were there were also plenty of shad and
we had a hard time getting a bite. Any tips or suggestions appreciated as
ususal. We smacked em again on the Cal last Friday, but didn't see much
baitfish activity at all.

Now I'm grounded with a broken down boat motor acccccck ! Thanks for any
help guys/gals

mike
--
God Bless America

Josh The Bad Bear

I keep a small selection of Kastmaster slab spoons in a variety of sizes for
this. I try to select on that matches the size of the bait. For larger
bait I'll pick one with a feather trailer to make it look bigger. I prefer
to fish these at just under my max casting range with medium or light
spinning tackle to maximize distance. I've got basically four retrieves.
Once I find the right size bait one of those retrieves will almost always
work on feeding bass and stripers that have bait balled up.

1. Cast past the school and retrieve erratically, but quickly just below
the school of bait.
2. Lift and drop off the bottom.
3. Burned retrieve with rop tip under water so bait screams through
school of bait about 1 foot below the the surface.
4. Rod held high so bait skips along and breaks the surface regularly.

My fallbacks for this is either a small popper worked slowly and erraticaly
with long pauses, or a drop shot rigged with a shad or shiner colored
plastic. I prefer the spoon becasue I can keep the boat well back from the
fish and pick them off fromt he sides of the activity before working through
the main area. This usually produces the highest numbers of fish. The
poppers and drop shots force me to move the boat up closer than I would
like, but they do work.

Another bait that will work is anything that will fish slowly along the
surface and produce a surface ripple. Yes, a buzzbait will soemtimes work,
but I prefer something a little more subtle if having to go that way. A
Kick-Tail lure works well, but they are expensive and fragile. Another fall
back is a white, white blue, or white with clear and sparkle back jerk bait
with the action tail. The tail I desrbie is similar to the legs on a Zoom
Horny Toad. Then jsut fish it slow and steady along the surface so it makes
a gentle but continuous surface disturbance. Now that I think about it I
bet a Horny Toad in the right color would probably do ok here too, and you
could certainly cast it further than the jerk bait or the smaller popper.


--
Bob La Londe
Fishing Arizona & The Colorado River
Fishing Forums & Contests
http://www.YumaBassMan.com




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