7 Species in one day

It had been 2 weeks since I had been on the river last. The Hartford area is still about 5 feet above normal but the water is very clean. Bob and I launched from Haddam Meadows this morning to normal water levels. It was a chilly start, but the sun burned the fog off quickly and we headed down river in search of stripers. I was surprised to see water temps right around the 52 degree mark. Less than 1/2 mile from the ramp we came across a seal heading north. For those of you not familiar with the river, that is about 20 miles inland. He must have been following a slug of herring or shad running up the river.

We fished a couple of flats that will eventually be loaded with stripers but found only a few schoolies.  They were hitting plastics on 1/2 ounce jig heads pretty hard. A couple of areas showed signs of life. I saw several herring flip fairly close to the boat. One small cove had 5 osprey working hard…  Another creek had a pair of bald eagles searching for a meal. We fished our way south and eventually turned around down at the mouth by the wood lot. By that time, the wind was blowing pretty good so we decided to try to find a spot out of the worst of it. We ran all the way back up to the shelter of the marinas in Chester and try our hand at some pike .

We threw 5 and 7″ Reaction Strike Revolution Shads. I missed a couple of fish but managed a pretty big pickerel on the 7″ bait.

I finally managed to stick a small pike. He hit it hard, I was hoping it was a bit bigger but it was a start.

From there, we worked our way up into one of the creeks in hopes of finding some stripers on herring or maybe another pike. Once we got into a protected area we could see quite a few nice crappie sunning themselves around some fallen trees. We grabbed the light rods and quickly tied on some jig heads with 2 1/2″ plastics  and tossed them out. It didn’t take long… For the next hour or so we had a ball playing around with the crappie. I kept 4 for dinner, they were all between 13 and 15″ . We also had a few blugill, perch and small largemouth in the mix. That’s the great thing about the Connecticut River… You just never know what you will catch. Great day to be on the water. We covered close to 60 miles today. I am wind burned and sun burned and can’t wait to do it again tomorrow! Stay tuned…