Pacemaker Fishing Forum

Janet and I went "live bait" fishing for striped bass at Lake Anna with guide Jim Hemby of Lake Anna Striper Guide Service.

We left the dock at High Point Marina at 5:30am with over 200 live herring baits on board. He had spent a few hours catching them before we arrived.

It was overcast and looked like it could start raining at any time. We wore rain gear but it never did rain on us.

First we wanted to put a few keepers in the cooler to make sure that we would bring some home, and then we would mostly do "catch and release" fishing... keeping only larger fish and fish that Jim deemed too injured to survive if released.

The minimum size for keeping a striper at Lake Anna is 20 inches and you can keep up to 4 stripers per person. So, our "limit" would be to keep 12.

We limited out shortly before 11 am. We had experienced a zillion hits, many just stole or maimed our baits without hooking up or staying hooked for long. We didn't use the landing net much and lost quite a few fish at boat side when we tried to lift them up out of the water and into the boat. Still, we boated a lot of fish and the use of circle hooks permitted us to release 40 of them.

We boated 52 stripers and 8 catfish. We kept 12 stripers, the largest was 28 inches and weighed a couple ounces short of 10 lbs.

See Jim Hemby's report for Thursday, June 04, 2009 at:
http://blog.jimhemby.com/










Apparently some were not yet done with spawning stuff... a few of the males milked up the deck a bit.


Our guide... Jim Hemby.


At the fish cleaning station, I got a lesson in fileting stripers by watching Lake Anna Guide Service's other guide, John Chadduck, for a while. He was kind enough to lend us his electric filet knife which made cleaning our fish go easier and faster.