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Schooling Bait Fish
"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 -- Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com |
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