4-26-11

Today I guided Keith, Jerry, and Gerry on a striper trip. We met at 5:30 launched the boat and headed to my usual starting point. We threw the anchor, got the lines out and paitently awaited the first fish. The minnows were nervous but when we did not immediately get a couple of fish I knew we were going to have to leave old faithful. We sat tight for an hour and landed a couple of fish but they were small and the action was too slow for me so we pulled anchor and went in search of. We went up stream a 1/2 a mile and begin drifting minnows along a break line. As we started down the break I was marking fish on the graph and knew it would only be seconds before we hooked up. Keith was the first to hook up, with Jerry and Gerry closely behind resulting in a triple hook up. All of the fish were small so we released them and made another pass. We ended up catching 16 fish out of this spot and put a couple of nice fish in the box. We moved up to the next water line and caught a few more fish with one being a 5 pounder for the box. After a couple of passes we decided to move on to the next spot and it was loaded with fish. We got a triple on 5 pounders the first pass, a double on 3-4 pounders the second pass, followed by another double of keepers on the thirds pass. We kept working our way down the bank and found another wad of fish at the bottom of the run resulting in another double. We kept at it and made a few more passes hooking up multiple times each pass. We kept the rest of the fish that we needed to get limits and then headed down stream to see if we could catch a sturgeon. We got anchored up where I had seen several sturgeon roll over the last couple of days, baited up and got the lines in the water. We never did get a sturgeon to bite but we did hook several nice sized stripers that were quickly released to fight another day. It was a great day on the water, with plenty of action. I will be in the hills tomorrow chasing pigs and back on the water by Thursday for some more striper action. The fish are finally starting to hold so the fishing should go wide open in the next couple of days. I will keep you posted!!

Casey