Magothy Pickerel, 12-30-11

[HJS]

I fished one of the side creeks on the Magothy today, 12-30-11, 1:00pm-3:30pm. I haven’t seriously fished the Magothy for pickerel for a couple of years. In light of recent pickerel successes reported here by others for the Severn I thought it high time to see if the Magothy has had a similar resurgence in pickerel populations.

Well, today was nothing to write home about. I had to cover a lot of territory and fish my butt off to catch 5 pickerel, biggest was 20.5” and the rest were smalls in the 14”-17” range. Keep in mind that where I fished the good pickerel territory starts right at the put-in and continues uninterrupted all the way to the back of the creek. So there was very little travel time when I wasn’t casting to good pier, rip-rap or downed-tree structure… and still, I only caught 5. I’d catch one here then 50 casts later I’d catch one there. No pattern to where they were found. So, unless today was just a bad hair day for pickerel, then I’m thinking there may not be many in the creek I was fishing.

All were caught on 4” Bass Assassin curlytails in my home-poured dirty pearl pattern (aka: remelted crystal shad) on a 1/4oz to 3/8oz heads. I used 20# leader to minimize bite-offs. Only missed one pickerel that hit right as I was lifting the lure to make the next cast. Water looked pretty good too; water clarity ranged 2.5’-3’. Beautiful day on the water.

[ictalurus]

Thanks for the report but sorry to hear things were relatively slow. Hopefully, the Magothy pickerel population will be back where it was a few years ago.

[J.A. Veil]

HJS -

I'm glad to hear that you caught some Magothy pickerel. My friend, Virgil Poe, has taken me out looking for pickerel in the Magothy many times. We had some good days and some days slower than yours. Virgil is truly a wealth of knowledge about pickerel in general and on the Magothy in particular.

I have been reporting some excellent pickerel catches in the Severn recently. Through lengthy trial and error, I have worked two separate tributaries in some detail until I found the specific areas that are holding fish. I estimate that less than 20% of the shorelines of either tributary hold pickerel right now. Once you find those areas, the fish are relatively abundant. But outside of those areas, they just are not there.

The fact that you caught five pickerel for 2.5 hours sounds like a decent day to me, particularly if this is your first outing there in a while. Until you figure out just where the fish are holding, catch rates anywhere are likely to be modest. Putting aside my successful catches in the past two weeks (which are most likely a fortuitous anomaly), a five-fish day is at least average, if not better than average over the past few years. As an example, I made six outings in Severn creeks last Jan and Feb. I did not have a single bite during those trips. On March 1, I tried a different location and found a large population of pickerel.

Congratulations on your catches. Don't get discouraged -- get back out again and work the same shorelines and some other areas until you gain some confidence about where the fish are located now. By the way, they do move around from month to month -- the places where I am catching pickerel in one of my preferred tributaries are at different depths and locations from where I was catching them 4-6 weeks ago.

[HJS]

Thanks for the words of encouragement relative to my lackluster day. I’ve fished this one creek for the past decade or so, probably 3 dozen+ trips during this time. The last really good years were 2005/2006 when a banner day was to catch 20-40 nice pickerel. Since then I’ve struggled to catch half-a-dozen pickerel per trip.

And you are right that not all creeks on the Magothy are created equal on any one day. I generally fish from my canoe with trolling motor and therefore my range is limited. Sometimes I use my bro-in-laws tin boat with small motor and can then visit several creeks in one day. Its then that I find out, once again, that action in some creeks can be turned off while on the same day other creeks will provide hot action. Dang pickerel are hard to figure out.

Yesterday, the reason I think populations are low in this creek is that all 5 pickerel hit on the first or second cast. So they were hot to trot when it came to eating something that swims by. I pretty much assume that when one is eating then all are eating. And since I only caught 5 I’m thinking there weren’t that many more swimming around or I would have caught them too.

I’m sure I’ll try again this winter. I’ll see what I catch then.