Pacemaker Fishing Forum

As mentioned before, Carl Johnson and I used to fish together all the time in the 80s but we had not fished the Potomac River (DC) in many a year.

So today, we set out to try for some stripers in his 17’ Rhino. At 1st, we weren’t sure if we should troll the channel or make the trek up to Fletcher’s but after reading Curly’s report from Thursday, the decision was made to head up river. We did troll the Kennedy Center wall and beyond but all we picked up was trash so we brought the lines in and made a bee line to Fletcher’s (at No Wake speed).

Twice along the way, the fish finder lit up and we stopped to see what we could pick up but that really was not the plan so we moved on up and eventually settled in just below the cove in 22 feet of water on the VA side.

Carl threw the sibiki (he was the designated bait boy) and I threw a few different kinds of jigs. It didn’t take long for Carl to nail a herring which would serve at striper/cat fish bait.



We put out 3 lines with cut bait and before too long; Carl took the skunk off the boat after he landed one of 7 cat fish for the day. But it was not a biggie and I threw it back without a picture. Carl, being a minnow on pacemakerfishing.com, was not too happy! A few minutes later, he landed a nice blue cat…..picture below!!



Not to be outdone, I too landed a cat fish and now we both had caught fish but no stripers yet…..



….until Carl got into this one!



Not to be outdone again, I then landed this beauty!



For the day, we caught three species (blue, bull and channel) of cat fish for a total of seven. We also caught ten stripers, four of them being keepers (+ 18”). Some of the stripers were caught on small white perch as well as cut herring. And we also increased out catching by actually "luring" the fish to ht the bait. We did not let the bait sit, we bounced it a bit (slight jigging) and that increased the catch probability for stripers (and lowered the cat catch probabilities).

These were some very fat little stripers!!



It was a great day on the water, a little windy but we decided to pull the anchor around 11:30 as the wind was really kicking up!



This was a good decision based on the storms that hit a little later in the afternoon!

Ernie