Pacemaker Fishing Forum

I still stink like shad…. 

I hit above the bridge yesterday afternoon in hopes of some smallmouth and maybe walleye.  When I got there the tide was low but the water clarity was almost perfect with a nice tint to it about 1-2 feet of visibility.  I saw two guys snagging gizzard shad every cast.  They seemed to enjoy themselves.  Then they leave and I'm still working the bottom with a tube rigged Texas with no hits, or snagged fish.  Then comes two fly guys.  They proceed to hook gizzard shad in the tail every single cast almost.  One guy even has one of those expensive long handle landing nets and lands the fish for guess what... HIS CLIENT and even proceeds to pose for a picture.  yes, that's right, he was guiding his client to snag gizzard shad.  I later walked up to him and said have you caught any hickories or Americans’ yet, (knowing what the answer would be) “yes, we've been killing them all week."  (Maybe he didn’t hear me.)  Unbelievable.  I later educated what he was catching but was told they were snagging themselves and that every few fish were caught in the mouth.  They were awfully thick in his defense, I will say that.  Try a circle hook with your fly, you will never snag another fish.  This guide will later only target snakeheads.  Those he might get to bite but in the spring I've seen hundreds upon hundreds of them up there in the eddies and absolutely ignore everything that comes near them.   

So, who wants to book a guide all day so we can snag gizzards with fly rods?  Wow, that would be so cool.  I fly fish but that right there just gave every fly fishermen a bad name.  At least fish for fish.  Sometimes you have to use different techniques.  If the fifth fish you caught comes in backwards, chances are your sixth and 7th will too.  Time to move, or try something else. 

Back to my report.  No walleye, quite a few nasty slimy gizzards and one nice smallmouth about 16 inches and its twin but it was a largemouth both caught on the new Berkley havoc creature type baits, texas rigged.  Oh yea, I had over a dozen gizzards hooked near the mouth on Rapala x rap jerk baits.  Think they were hitting them too?

Last edited by Salmo (Mar-22-11 8:01AM)