Where to fish...

[Mark]

From Ron:

"Really, there are few “secrets” for long-term, avid kayak fishermen...it is the casual, once in a while, recreational fisherman who finds our words of wisdom as nuggets of gold...and I fully support promoting our sport...we enjoy it, why deny anyone the same enjoyment? It is true that there are locations, small ponds and streams that cannot support much fishing pressure, but as a whole, the migratory nature of fish that populate the Chesapeake Bay minimize such considerations...

That said...the guys I fish with are all avid, experienced master Anglers...and while I am an old guy, I learn new tricks from them every season I have the privileged of being on planet Earth...we can always learn something...no one know everything about anything."


Well said.

Angling knowledge comes into play when visiting a body of water for the first time and looking for areas that provide the most promising locations for catches based on tide, current, depth and obvious structure. That knowledge is regularly shared here on Snaggedline, in lectures, books and via other media and it's transferrable from site to site.

But there are areas in a given body of water that prove productive based the fact that fish have fins and use them to appear with some regularity in less predictable spots than those cited above. Those are the real gems of information and we typically learn them from the experiences others who are generous enough to share. I'm thankful for those folks.

[J.A. Veil]

I find it frustrating and entertaining at the same time, when I fish many hundred yards of shoreline in a particular body of water that all look equally good to me. But most of the time, only a few small sectors within that larger range actually produce fish. There must be some reason why the fish are there and why they were biting, but I have not figured out what is "special" about those sectors. Fortunately for me, I still have a good memory that allows me to remember pretty well where I caught those fish on the last visit there. Often, they are in the same spots. Of course, fish are not sitting there waiting for my arrival -- they do move. On some days I stop at the previously productive spots and get no bites. I move 50 yds away or around a corner and find fish on that day.

On the topic of learning new things, I am proud of the improvement I made in using a topwater popper last fall. In a few fall trips, I caught more topwater stripers than in all my previous years of fishing combined, and the average size of caught fish increased too. Part of that was the willingness to devote time to using a less familiar lure type. Another part was trying a different brand of popper that produced better than the brand I had used primarily in the past. I can think of two spots in particular in Eastern Bay that I visited in my boat repeatedly. I threw the popper along a bunch of shoreline habitat that looked the same to me. At both of the locations I noted before, all the topwater fish came in an area of about 100 ft length.

[Big Mike]

This fall I got a text from Ron to try for flounder in a spot during slack tide at a spot we were hitting in the fall. Never thought to try it there but said what the heck. I used a slightly different lure and method but soon found myself having a blast (in large part because I rarely fish for flounder so didn’t know what I should have thrown I accidentally found a pattern). After that we would all target the flounder during slack periods and it filled in a nice chunk of time between striper action. None of us know it all and I could have been stubborn and said I’m not going to listen to a text from someone not on the water. That would have been a mistake, I like to think for all of us in SMOG.

[tarponguy]

Would be curious to know which brand/type of popper you found to be the best??

[J.A. Veil]

Would be curious to know which brand/type of popper you found to be the best??

For the past few seasons, I had been using a Stillwater Smack-It Jr. It looked good, but I caught very few fish. Consequently, I did not spend a lot of time casting it. Last May, when fishing in Tampa, my guide gave me a Mirrolure C-Eye Poppa Mullet to use at sunup. I did very well on speckled trout. I brought a few of those home and devoted some extra effort using it. My topwater success improved dramatically. Whether it was the different lure, my confidence in that lure, or just spending more time using it, I caught more topwater fish in 2018 than in all other years combined. The first photo shows the lure as it comes from the package. I remove the two trebles and fish it with a single J-hook trimmed with bucktail on the back and nothing on the front position.

2003-08-01 00-06-16.jpg 2018-10-04 14-30-19.jpg

[Mark]

For stripers, I'm not wedded to a particular brand of popper. I do find that most regular largemouth bass poppers work just fine for stripers when kayak fishing. But I also find situations where the style of the popper or surface lure may matter.

If the surface is relatively quiet, I think a walk-the-dog style plug is best.

If the surface is choppy, I use a popper that makes more disruption, more chugging.

If fish are breaking, it doesn't matter what you throw.

Like John, I remove the trebles. I put two undressed in-line hooks on the walk-the-dog plugs. I remove all trebles and replace only the back hook on a regular popper with an in-line hook and dress it with feathers or bucktail.

Also, I believe a slow action rod will improve surface hookups. In lieu of that, if you have a fast action rod, loosen your drag so there is some "give" when you strike. You don't want to strike so hard that you pull the lure from the fish's mouth. Just remember to tighten the drag as you reel in the fish -- although I think the fish itself will remind you to do that!

[BarefootPetr]

It's amazing to me how tiny the adjustments can be to get fish biting. You can drift your bait past a fish perfectly during one tide and they don't give it a sniff. Then the next tide you hook up left, right, and center. Over the weekend I found the fish hitting my lure when I cast it upstream, while casting across or downstream yielded either nothing or a clump of weeds.

[ronaultmtd]

Same with trolling...seems they hit in one direction but not at the same spot coming at it 180 degrees...and it isn’t the added current nor speed of the lure...notice that folks fishing from the bank casting out and retrieving back to the bank come up empty, but cast towards the bank coming out to deeper water gets strikes...When I encounter this, I normally just stop trolling and sit there casting and catching...last year on many trips I used trolling just to locate fish, then used casting and jigging to fill the stringer...what is telling is when you find willing fish, they can be very picky about color and action or they can be hitting anything you happen to have on board..found both situations...sometimes it is strictly one swimbait in one color...othertimes they want a jerkbait worked hard and when it is top water, most anything that makes a commotion on the water works...the prop tail baits, big chuggers and walk the dog...floating Rapala twitched...all have their applications...like John Veil said...smooth water seems to be the forte of finesse walking the dog baits, while rough water requires loud poppers...the subsurface walking the dog finesse baits have worked for me over flats of grass for speckled trout and striped bass as have the “Redfish magic” spinners...