Fishing Day 2 with Jason, Cindy, and John...April 9th, 2023

Thankfully, my friend, Jen, came yesterday and today to walk them, while I was gone. Thanks Jen, it's much appreciated! :)

It was 5:30 when I left the house, this morning.  I was picking my crew up at the Country Inn and Suites, across town, at 6am. I hit the gas station for ice, but forgot my crew had my cooler from the day before, so I threw it up on the back of the boat and headed to the hotel. They had gotten ice too, so we had an overabundance of ice this morning. Oops!

It was chilly this morning, but the weatherman said it would be warming up to around 53 degrees by noon. It was 37 degrees when we launched at Catawba, and the wind barely made a ripple across the surface of the lake. The wind forecast was for 7-8 out of the east, but I think it was probably around 5mph all morning. the sky was clear of clouds all day, so we also got a great satellite picture this afternoon.

We headed north towards Niagara again, but were going to look at the deeper side of it, to the east, this time. I was expecting to find some muddy water, but it was clean, so we kept heading north until we found some good mixing water with some fish marks in it.

Speaking of fish marks....my sonar is working perfectly after installing the latest Helix software update last night. That monkey is off my back now...whew! 

We set up with Bandits on both sides, running behind the Off Shore boards.

The port side was set at 80, 60, 50, 40 (long leads on the outside), and the port side ran at 100, 77, 67, and 57.

Colors that caught fisher were:

Taco Salad (stock)

Freak Show (Hammertime Lures/Sandusky Bait Co.)

Blue Chrome (Stock)

Red Headed Wonderbread (not stock, but I can't remember where I got them from)

Electric Zebra (stock)

At one point, I swapped out the Bandits on the starboard side to all Spro 120s and ran them at 97, 67, 50, and 40.

Colors that caught were the

Blue Chrome (stock)

Chrome Perch (stock)

RC Crush (DJ Custom Eye Lures)

Around 11AM I noticed the water temp on the Fish Hawk was colder down below (43.2) than the surface temp reading from my Helix (44), so I thought since we were in muddy water that the fish might be nose bleed high to soak up some of that warmth from the sunshine without getting blinded, and brought a few baits up really high....like 20 feet behind the board kind of high. 

The Red Headed Spro at 20 back got pulled back hard within 5 minutes of setting it, but it was a hit and a miss.

Then, I had Jason set his two inside Bandits at 20 and 30 back, too, and the 20 back took a nice fish, not too long after.

We were doing a lot of S-Turns,  and sometimes they hit on the fast side, and sometimes they hit on the slow side.  I was trying to keep the speed at the lures around 1.3 to 1.5 mph, which on the Helix was  1.6 to 1.9mph. 

Jason, Cindy, and John had a better time today than yesterday, because the weather was so much nicer, and the fish were more cooperative.  We will be launching out of Mazurik's tomorrow, for their last day.

I think all of the fish caught today were already spawned out...and, I think all those marks on my sonar this morning were already spawned out fish that just needed to rest up after getting beat up. It won't be long and they will put the feed bag on. Oh what fun that will be, eh? :)

Stay tuned... 

Capt Juls