Pacemaker Fishing Forum

Today, I was supposed to fish with jimmy, Paul, Tony and Gary.  The only problem was that on Thursday and Friday, the weather forecasters were calling for 2-4” of rain between Friday and Saturday so we cancelled the trip and rescheduled for later in May.

I was not a happy camper since this would have been the last opportunity to fish the Potomac for 3 weeks! Happily, I received a call from Curly on late Friday afternoon (after I had cancelled). He said that there might be a 5-6 hour window of opportunity between noon and 6. So…we studied the weather and decided that we would talk in the AM to see how much it had rained overnight. Surprise, surprise….it did not rain!! The weather forecaster totally blew it….they were not even close.

We gathered a crew (Curly and Jimmy) and off to the river we went. By 11:45, we were fishing (trolling on the way up to he Fletcher’s area).

We started fishing for perch, shad and herring and it looked pretty grim at 1st. it took a while before Jimmy took the smell off the boat as he landed a decent white perch.



Then Curly got in to the act …..


…….with a nice keeper.

This catching went on for several hours. It was never very hot but it was steady and the ratio of keepers to throwbacks was pretty high. I think we kept 16 keepers over 9” (biggest was close to 11”).

We also had some great entertainment from this guy in the canoe.



He had some greenies (not fish) on board and was wailing away on the perch. He gave us a lesson and invited us to fish by him. In the picture above, he had the couple row over and he gave the rod to the lady on board so she could reel in a fish. It was pretty cool as he was a very happy (alcohol induced) guy.

After we got tired of catching perch we went after cats and stripers. Curly got on the board 1st with this nice one…..


…..and then Jimmy followed suit with this one.



We then moved again to try a different spot and jimmy got a real nice one!



We finally called it a day and headed on in. The views are always spectacular!!



For the day, we had 7 blue cats up to 8-9 pounds and over 50 white perch. We managed to salvage a washout and turn it in to a pretty nice day!!

Ernie