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…

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.

We kept picking away. Nothing big landed but we had a couple of shots at 40″ range fish. One came completely out of the water to take a spook. She was on the hook for a good 20 seconds and was gone… Here are a few pics from a very good day on the river:

The wind was cranking when we got to the flats. We had a couple more hours left in the outgoing tide and with the wind out of the southeast, there was a good chop going. We slowed down just after the first rockpile to take a look at the Side Imaging. I couldn’t believe how many fish were there! Mike hooked up on his first cast and it never stopped for the next 5 hours…

Over the next 5 hours, we boated 41 keepers. Nearly all of them were caught on big Super Spooks. As well as they were working, we tried other lures just to see what they would hit. We caught a couple on Houdini’sbut they were totally keyed in on the spooks. There were stretches were we went 10 consecutive casts with either a hook up or a hit. Eventually, I put the rod down for almost an hour so that I could get some video of the action. We could have easily done over 50 fish… I’ve never seen anything like it. The bite lasted through the outgoing, slack and well into the incoming tide. Normally the fish transition as the water flow changes but we never moved more than 1000 feet the entire trip. We just moved back and forth along the break on the trolling motor and kept casting.

As it got darker, I tied on a 7″ Revolution Shad to see if maybe we could get them to hit something different. In the hour, I had boatedanother 6 keepers on it. Normally, I work them eratically, twitching them and snapping them in between quick retrieves. Today, a steady retrieve was what the wanted. I reeled them just fast enough that the lure would create a slight wake but not break the surface. Some of the hits were spectacular. One fish came out of the water about 3 feet way from the lure and landed on it…

15 minutes later we stopped in an area that had produced for us before. We had hits on pencil poppers on the first 2 casts. We spent the next couple of hours within a mile of that spot. Most of the fish were smaller but the hits on top were spectacular. There was now warning with the tell tale wakes behind the plugs or boils, just explosions. We had fish up to 38″ and put 8 or so in the boat before the bite slowed. Here are a couple of pics:

After that bite died, we headed out to the reefs with eels to see if we could find some better fish. First stop was Long Sand Shoal. The incoming tide was cranking. Our drifts were 3 1/2 MPH and the water was very dirty, making visibilty all but zero. From there, we went east to Hatchett Reef. Things were much better there. The drifts were a bit over 2 and the water was nice and clean. We marked fish as soon as we pulled up in 50 feet of water. The action was OK. No big fish, but we managed a couple more bass and a bluefish before we ran out of time.

I have one more week of charters in the river and I’ll be back on the reefs full time, I’m really looking forward to getting back to Niantic again!

It was a steady pick of fish with afew good ones in the mix, top waters drew the most strikes. We never moved more than 100 yards from the fish, staying with them all morning. It was nice being cloaked in the fog and having them all to ourselves. They were in a very concentrated area and easy to find on the Humminbird side imaging. That was definitely was key in staying with them. As you can see in the screen shot here, there were tons of fish on the flat!

We had several other fish in the same area, most of them just over keeper sized. Sometime around 5 the for rolled in from the south and visibilty dropped off to nothing. I knew it would be a good morning at then, the bass would stay shallow and as long as we could stay stealthy on the trolling motor we could get them to eat. Big wooden spooks were working well. It can be tough to get the cadence down, but once you master that rythmic walk the dog, the bass found them irresistable. Mike hooked up on a good fish. They sure fight great in 3 feet of water…

 The top water bite lasted for a few hours with some real quality fish in the mix:

It was inevitable that the blues would eventually show up. Most were small, but there were also some bruisers in the mix. Mike had a monster on a spook. This one took a good 5 minutes to finally boat.

I’ll take calm, foggy mornings any day of the week. I Wish it was like this every morning…

After a while, things slowed a bit and I decided to put a jig on. On the first cast I hooked up with what I thought was a massive striper. After a few minutes, the fish surfaced… It was no striper… I had foul hooked a sturgeon in the dorsal fin. I have seen sturgeon breach on the flats before but had never had the opportunity to see one up close. They are a protected species and really shouldn’t be removed from the water, but I couldn’t get the hook out. We never brought here in the boat so I have no idea how long it was but I’m guessing roughly 4 feet long. We managed to get a few pictures. What a cool looking fish!

We kept picking away at the bass and as it got a bit darker out, the action began to pick up as did the size of the fish… At one point we had a double and very nearly a triple header of good sized fish on. They were all hitting soft plastics. With fish blowing up all around us, the excitement was contagious, Mike couldn’t help but give us his best Skeet Reese imitation.

Josh had a hell of a hit on a spook. The fish measured 38″ and so far is his biggest of the season. The fog really got thick and things got damp and chilly in a hurry so we packed it in around 9:30. It was a great night to fish. Here are a few more pics of some of our bigger fish from the evening:

I had Steve and Neal on board today. Due to time constraints they had, we were not able to fish the southern end of the river where we knew the bite to be good. They were fine with fishing the Rocky Hill stretch so that’s what we did. It was a quick 4 hour trip but we made the most of it. We fished hard for stripers with top waters, Houdini’s and Revolution Shads but had no interest so they asked to switch over to pike for a bit. No sweat… I changed leaders to 50lb fluoro and we headed south to a couple of out of the way spots I know. Along the way we saw several eagles out today. This pair was enjoying the sun while keeping an eye on the nest.

 We got to the bend in the river and found ourselves all alone… Within 3 casts we had our first follow and not long after that Neal had a beast of a pike come up and inhale his Revolution Shad. The fish hit right at the boat, we were in only 3 feet of water and the I could here the fish banging on the bottom of the boat.  What a gorgeous fish!

We had several other follows and swipes at that same spot. One of which Steve saw and said that it was at least as big as the one that Neal boated! We were running out of time so we started working our way back north again and stopped one more time at a spot that usually produces for me. There were a ton of fish there as well. no hook ups but lots of follows. We were running the lures over the tops of the weeds and you could wath the pike just materialize out of the weed cover and stalk the baits. We could have done better with a little more time but if we actually had the time, we wouldn’t have even launched up here.  I will have to make time to get back out there and target the pike again in the next few days…

Clay hooked up right after we released Dan’s fish, another wicked top water hit.

We had a spectacular sunrise the whole time we were picking bass off.
It was nice not having to fight the wind for once…

  We had several more fish in that area before the action tapered off around 6:30. Dan stuck another real nice fish on the popper. This one almost gave me a heart attack. It hit within 10 feet of the boat and sounded like someone had dropped a cinder block off a bridge. Most of the other ones we had were closer to the size that Clay is holding.

After things got quiet, we moved a little south to some shallow water areas that had been holding fish for me. We spent the rest of the trip fishing in 3-5 feet of water. We found that as the sun got higher, the fish were not chasing the lures down at all. We switched over to jigs and found that working them slowly on the bottom was the ticket. I even got in on the action for a little while. The total for the day was 19 keepers. The bite was still going strong when we ran out of time, we had to leave them biting…

None of the usual spots had fish today so we tried some of my old areas that I hadn’t spent much time on in recent years. We finally managed to find a few fish. We saw a couple of herring getting blasted and made our way over on the trolling motor. It didn’t take long to connect…

It was not a great day by any means but after yesterday, I’ll take it. Some nice fish in shallow water with some vicious hits. Looks like an inch or so of rain tonight, that should really fire things up. It will also keep the cotton wood seeds from making a mess of things. Hopefully tomorrow’s charter wants to fish in the rian, I have a good feeleing…