Archive for CT River Fishing
A wet 2 hours
Posted by: | CommentsBut it was worth it… The river has been out of control for the last week. I’ve had to cancel a few trips due to high and very dirty water, this should be prime time on the river right now. The river has been dropping since Friday but it is still 8 feet above normal. The ramp in Rocky Hill is usable and we figured the water clarity should be improving by now so Mike and I decided to do a little scouting for this weeks charters.
It never stopped raining for the 2 hours we were out but the Frabill Stormsuits kept us bone dry. We tried a couple of different areas. The first spot was 8-10 feet deep over an area that usually holds some herring. They were there… So were the bass. I started off throwing a Live Target Blue Back Herring and hooked up with just a few casts of shutting the motor down. Nice start…
From there we moved out a little deeper and tried some soft plastics on jig heads. Pat Renna of T-Man Custom Tackle gave me a few prototypes of a new soft plastic he is working on. They looked great and I was anxious to try them out. I put one on a 1/2oz head and began bouncing bottome in 12 feet of water. It didn’t long at all to get thumped hard. As I was fighting mine, Mike hooked up with a 7″ Limetruese Slug-Go on a jig head as well. Both were nice fat keepers.
I also managed one more decent fish on a Bass Harasser. This was back in 10 feet of water and I was just bouncing the lure along the bottom when the bass nearly ripped the rod out of my hands. We were back at the ramp around 5:30, not a bad two hours. It makes me feel a lot better about tomorrow’s charter!
One of my regular fishing partners returned from college this week… Just in time. Josh and I launched in the dark with a light drizzle and empty lot this morning. There was only one other boat there, very surprising for a Sunday morning. We had fish on our first 5 drifts but it quickly died around 6. We had hits on Revo Shads, Slug-Gos, Stick Shadds and Houdini’s. There was a good amout of bait around dimpling the surface but I have yet to see any blitzes on top. I dropped my biggest fish of the year after a vicious hit and a brief thrashing on the surface but at least I got to see it. I’ll get her tomorrow….
I fished with Eric Cormier this morning. He wanted to learn the stretch of water in the Rocky Hill area. I look forward to fishing this area all year long. It’s no nice launching in the dark. It’s quiet and every bird around is singing. We heard turkeys, owls, eagles and lots of ducks. There was just a bit of fog, not enough to slow us down but it made for a nice sunrise on the river.
It’s been the same thing every morning with the stripers… They are there but not in big numbers and they are not real aggressive. We see multiple fish on every drift and then it dies by 7 or so. Once things slowed, we went out a bit deeper and threw 6″ Salt Shakers on 1/2oz jigs in 20 feet of water. Still slow but we put a few more in the boat before pulling the plug around 9. T-Man Super Swimmers got the big fish of the day again…
This morning I had Frank and Bill from Frabill on board. Fishing was OK. It was nice to have a morning where the wind wasn’t howling. We fished the usual places and found a few The action wasn’t hot and heavy but enough to keep everyone happy. T-Man Super Swimmers caught the majority of our fish today.
On our way to another spot, we came across a hen wood duck with a ton of young. I counted 24 in this picture. I wanted to get closer for a better pic but she wasn’t happy and I didn’t want to separate any of them from momma.
Finally?
Posted by: | CommentsI have never been so frustrated with the spring run before… Just when things look like they are ready to get going good, the fish disappear again. I was out on Monday, I did over 30 miles on the river and found nothing. The water was cleaning up but still pretty dirty. I decided to give it a day off and try again this morning.
Mike and I found a few fish right off the bat. The clarity was much better and the fish were willing to come up. We doubled up on keepers in the first 5 minutes or so.
We did OK for the remainder of the morning… We had another 3 keepers and a bunch of smaller fish. We had hits on just about everything we threw. The Sebile Stick Shadd was a blast. We used both the floating and suspending versions and caught on both. Houdini’s in Arkansas Shiner did well as did the Magnum Super Spooks. We caught fish in up to 12 feet of water but most were in the 4-6 foot range. I’ll be back out on Thursday and Friday, hopefully things continue to improve!
Better late than never
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After weeks of high, cold, dirty water if finally looks as if our striper season is starting to crank up here in the Connecticut River. Normal flows in the Hartford area are usually around 3 to 4 feet. As you can see, we’ve been well above that for quite some time. The water is warmin up, we’ve had 48 to 49 in the main stem with temps over 60 in some the coves. The alewives are in pretty thick in places and finally some bigger stripers are on the hunt!
After closing up Conneticut Outfitters for the day, Mike swung by and picked me up at 6:30 and we headed out for the night bite. The river was barely launchable where we were, but we managed to get the boat in the river. We headed straight to the mouth of a creek that has a decent run of alewives. There the water was much cleaner and warmer than the main river. We immediately saw signs of life. I tied on a 9″ Reaction Strike Revolution Shad and began fan casting the area. On the second cast, I had a big wake come up behind the lure and follow it for 20 feet back to the boat. This happened several times without getting a hit. We weren’t worried, the lures were the perfect immitation of an alewife, we just needed it to get a bit darker out. As it began to get dark, we could see and hear stripers smashing bait on top… It was only a matter of time…
I have no idea what time, but it was good and dark out, we began getting hits. It was just a slow and steady retrieve with an occassional twitch. The hits were vicious! We threw lots of different lures from soft plastics to wood… Bombers, pencils, spooks, Slug-Go’s, Houdini’s and danny’s but in the end, all of our fish came on the big Revo Shads.
It was a great night on the water, no wind at all and no bugs (yet). It got chilly towards the end but we were dressed for it. Here are a couple of pics of the two largest fish for the night.
And so it begins…
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s been tough to find much time to fish these days with Connecticut Outfitters being so busy, so when the opportunity presented itself, I jumped on it. Mike met me at the house around 6:30 tonight and we loaded the gear in my truck and headed out in the monsoon. Another inch or so of rain is forecsat for tonight. The main river is cranking and dirty in our area so we went to a creek that I had found alewife in earlier in the week. I knew the water would be high but at least there would be some visibility…
I had a decent fish roll on my Revo Shad on my very first cast but he never came back again. There were plenty of alewives around, I actually snagged one as he was trying to mate with the lure on the retrieve.
I played with a couple of other lures and sizes as it got darker but finally tied on a black and purple Bomber… That’s what the wanted. I only got one fish to the bank but dropped another and missed 3 other fish. It sure felt good to get the dust off the rod. It only gets better from here!
Bad day of fishing is better than…
Posted by: | CommentsA bad day of fishing is NOT always better than a good day at work… If was just one of those days.
Over 3″ of rain had the river on the rise. Mike and I figured that the ice would have been gone from some of our better spots for pond shiners. We decided to give it a shot before the water got out of control. We met were in the water by 7 and made our way to the first spot only to find close to an inch of ice still. I wasn’t too upset, as that means that I might be back walking on that same spot again this weekend. We found a couple of other spots that were open and we spent a couple of hours there in search of pondies but they just weren’t eating this morning. Something in the back of my mind was telling me to pull the plug and head home, but we decided to stay and switch gears…
Sorry for the poor quality cell phone pics ,but today was supposed to be a bait day so I never brought my camera.
We pulled up to one of my deeper catfish holes, and instantly, the fish finder went nuts. We tied on some jigs and dropped down to 30 feet and began jigging. It wasn’t long before I got thumped. This was a good fish for the river! On 4 lb test and a cranking current, it took a while but we managed to boat the cat. She weighed 12 pounds!
It’s been a while since I’ve seen so many cats in one hole ,we jigged for a while and put a dozen or so in the boat. Mike had a good one that was probably close to 9 pounds and I dropped another big one at the boat. I happend to look up at Mike and he was just standing there staring at me with this weird look on his face. I kinda had a feeling what was coming next… “Dude, I got 2 hooks in me”
Yep… Not quite sure how he managed it but he had 2 out of the 3 trebles buried in his hand.
As painful as it looked, they were in a pretty good spot to pop back out. It wasn’t what you’d call a text book extraction but we manged to get them out with out too much blood shed. Mike managed to hold my phone for quick video of the procedure. Here is the video:
That little episode took the wind out of our sails so we headed back to the ramp. I beached the boat and Mike ran to the truck only to find that his battery was dead. The river was coming up fast at this point. When Mike had parked the truck, the water was well behind the trailer. The trailer was now in the water as was half the truck. Luckily one of our customers from the shop happened to be at the ramp and offered us a jump.
The battery was complete junk, a jump wasn’t enough. I got a ride back to the shop to grab my truck and tools and returned to the ramp to remove the battery from the boat. We made the swap and the truck fired right up. I was hoping that as bad as the old battery was it would have enough juice to crank the little outboard up so we dropped it in. Nope… We ended up using jumper cables from the trolling motor and she just barely turned over but it was enough to get her running again. We finally loaded the boat and got the hell out of there.
Not the best of days on the water but at least we caught a few fish…
Crappie Thanksgiving
Posted by: | CommentsAs I have for the last several years on Thanksgiving, I launched the boat this morning to look for some crappie. It was 24 degrees as I was prepping the boat before sunrise. I found that quite a few of my hatches were frozen shut. I had to pour some water on them to get them open. The water than hit the deck quickly froze… Ah, the joys of late November fishing…
Today I had Justin withe me. A quick stop at CT Outfitters for bait and were were in the water 5 minutes later. In addition to searching for crappie, we also looked around for some brush piles and log cribs to mark on the GPS for future icefishing trips. I found 3 more piles in Wethersfield cove that I wasn’t aware of. Once we had them marked in Justin’s hand held and my 1197, we headed south for White Oaks cove. I wasn’t sure we’d be able to get in but I figured it was worth a shot. Along the way, we passed a guy duck hunting from a kayak, a father and son with 2 labs pheasant hunting along the bank and a group of 4 guys goose huntingat the entrance to the cove. It was nice to see so many guys out enjoying the morning!
We got 3/4 of the way into the cove when the keel started rubbing the bottom. I could still make headway but the tide was on its way out. I really didn’t feel like having to get out of the boat so we turned around and headed back up to Wethersfield Cove. We went straight to the brush piles I had found earlier in 16 feet of water and threw out marker bouys on 2 of them. There was almost no wind at all so we slowly orbited the piles on the trolling motor hammering fish as we went. I used a Lindy Little Nipper tipped with a small shiner. Many hits were so soft, the only way you knew you had a hit was to watch the line tick on the hit. Others absolutely thumped the jigs. There was no real pattern although we found most of our bigger fish up on a 12 foot flat. We also had several perch, bluegill and largemouth in the mix. None were big bu we had crappie up to about 12″.
We were back on the trailer by 11:00. Not a bad few hours on the river! I hope to get out a couple more times before I breakout the ice gear.
Veterans Day pike
Posted by: | CommentsThis is the time of year that I spend many mornings on the river either fishing for pike or crappie. The marinas are now empty, there is no traffic on the river, the weather cool and crisp. This morning I had a charter with Paul and Jack. We left from Rocky Hill at 6:30 and began our search. The conditions were right, the water was on it’s way down from the heavy rains, temps were 45 and it was great visibilty… Too bad the pike weren’t interested.
I switched lures numerous times, trying different sizes and colors. About 3 hours into the trip, Jack finally hooked up on a Lindy M/G Buck-A-Boo Muskie spinner. She was about 32″. We had another one on a Sebile Magic Swimmer. She was a bit bigger, but she came off along side the boat.
We moved around a bit but never managed to hook another fish. We had a few boils but no more fish. The bals eagles were out in force today. We saw at least 6 and were able to get close enough to a couple for some good shots. What better way to commemorate Veterans Day?????
