So much for getting steadily better & better...

Not sure what’s going on with the stripers there this year, but despite an improvement in conditions that we all expected would spur a pretty solid increase in fish activity, we ended up instead with just another tough weekend on the Housy. The electronics show too many fish, in schools too large, to even begin to comprehend how many fish might be in the river. But for the most part, the fish in these massive schools seem to be suffering some type of eating apathy.

My son drove down from Vermont to fish with me this weekend. On Saturday, we caught 52 between us, and my buddy Jim joined us in the afternoon and added another dozen or so to the total catch for the day. By far, the hottest thing we had going most of the day was dead sticking a 4″ Fin-S Fish (Albino/Chartreuse Tail) a foot or two off bottom directly under the boat, in 25 to 27 feet of water. Those numbers might appear to contradict my claim of lousy fishing, but the counts were artificially boosted when frustration with the lack of action led us to beat kind of hard on a bunch of much smaller fish we found that were a little less turned off. Under normal conditions, we would have left those little guys as soon as we saw their size. But the bite was tough, and we needed to set some hooks.

On Sunday, we were off the water at mid-day, as Tom wanted to get home to Vermont during the daylight hours. We refrained from beating up on the little guys again, and our numbers were 18, 12 and 13 for myself, Tom and Jim respectively. Not a great catch, but better than anyone else we spoke with during our day on the water. The deadstick approach still worked, but it had to be a bit higher in the water column, and the fish seemed a whole lot more responsive to a bigger, brighter bait than the day before. Sunday’s ‘hot ticket’ was a 5″ Fin-S Fish (Limetreuse), fished on a 1/2 ounce head.

All weekend, most of the relatively few fish that we caught on the cast, with the bait somewhere other than hanging straight down beneath the rod tip, hit the lure on the sink, before the retrieve had started. So except for a few suicide fish, they seemed to completely ignore any presentation that involved moving a lure horizontally through the water. And they weren’t all that interested in one moving vertically or sitting still either, if you must know the truth.

I’m giving these fish one more weekend to get their collective act together and start biting. If they aren’t active by next weekend, well, I’ll probably give them another, and another. But don’t tell them that, OK?

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