Pacemaker Fishing Forum

Today, Greg and I were supposed to be smallie fishing down in Luray (So. Fork of the Shenandoah) with CT Campbell but the river took a hit from the weekend T-Storms so we had to cancel...for the 3rd time this spring! The river spiked from 3.5' to 7' in 24 hours. And that's a lot as the river is not as wide down there as the 'mac is up here.

Since Greg had the day off...we decided to do some shad fishing.

The tide was at high (8:15a) and the water coming off the dam increased as the day wore on.

We started below the footbridge and I got my skunk off!



Hmm...camera man playing games?



But it was slow here so we decided to go up river since no one was there.

In short order, Greg had his skunk off!



Then he git a nice 17.25"er!



Which he followed later with a nice 17"er...and 2 more in the high 16s!

I did manage to catch big fish honors with a 17.75"er! But I don't know if we got that fish.
It could be one of these two...





Greg then got his 1st double!



It did slow up a bit and time was getting short so I decided to go back below the footbridge but we only managed 3-4 fish. Bad move Captain!

So back up we go and we chatted some with a new friend (Capt. Rich Johnson) who was having a good day in his spot. We saw a rod bend over nicely and knew a big battle had just started. The young man in the front of the boat (he skipped school today but was with his dad) had the big fight on with a BIG catfish!



We were really low on numbers and were making up a bunch of excuses when I told Greg it was time to set goals. We had a little over an hour to reach 30. We were at 12-10 in favor of Ernie.

So then, it started. We started catching at a great rate and it was game on!

Interestingly, there are no more pics in the camera. I wonder what happened??

Anyway, our numbers started climbing and we were getting close to lunch time at Brickmaker's so we caught some more.

We quit at 1:10p (10 minutes of stoppage time) with a score of 28-18 in favor of Ernie.

Greg was hungry and wanted to go. We left an amazing bite to go have lunch!! But it was worth it. We had a great comeback and a great lunch. We both had chili and it was tasty. I had the brat and Greg had the Jr. B Burger. And...no pics!

We did find it slow for a bit and maybe overthought some things but once we dialed in, we caught close to 25 shad in a little over an hour. I wonder what our number would have been if we stayed a bit longer...

The bite was definitely better at the tail end of the outgoing tide.

Great day to be out although it did get chillier (and sprinkled some) as the day progressed. Water temps were @62df.