Jonas Green 10/24/12

[quikdrive]

Decided to skip work and see if I could score some stripers. Got to the park before sun rise. Threw a chug bug along the shore and pielings headed towards the bay and only had one hit. When the sun came up I headed up river towards the senior living home trolling a bucktail and a sassy shad and got nothing. Fished the creek by senior living home with no luck. Tide started slowing down so I switched to bottom fishing. Ended up having the best luck off the old RR bridge. Got about a dozen perch. One was a decent size. Fish finder started acting up and then slack tide hit so I wrapped up around 1:30. I did troll over a few large schools but no hookups. I am thinking I might need more weight on my line to get deeper. Schools seemed to be around 15-20'.

[chex]

Nice. I like the idea of throwing a bunch of ice in the yak to keep fish cool.

[quikdrive]

Yeah I tried that out for the first time yesterday and it worked pretty good. That storage space on my moken is hard to get to and I only store items I really don't need so it worked out perfectly. Plus it has scupper holes in that compartment so it drains the water. Bow rode a little lower but not bad. After I added the ice my fishfinder signaled low voltage after about 30min even though it should have had enough charge. I am curious if the battery being next to the ice had something to do with it.

[dsiekman]

Nice. I like the idea of throwing a bunch of ice in the yak to keep fish cool.

+1 Love the idea but it wouldn't work real well with a sit in. My feet would get pretty cold.

[HJS]

quikdrive - Here's my basic approach to weights of jigheads. I rarely use less than .5oz heads unless the water is really shallow, like 5' or less. In depths up to 12' I use .5oz. At greater depths over 12' I switch to 3/4oz or 1oz heads. Sometimes the jig has to be kept very near the bottom where the fish are AND must be worked fairly fast. At such times you need the extra weight to keep a fast retrieve near bottom. All this jig heads will be rigged with 4" to 8" Bass Assassin type lures.

[Fishinfool]

Regarding ice on board, I like to keep my boat as light as possible. For what it's worth, what I do is put the fish on a stringer and keep 'em live and healthy as long as I can. If I have a stringer full and have to paddle a long way back home, I just bring 'em on deck for a few hundred yards, and put 'em back in the water as I slow down and take a short breather, then repeat. They''ll stay alive for 5-10 minutes of hard paddling, or I'll just drag 'em. When I get back to the car, I make sure that I already have plenty of ice in the cooler waiting.

Not sure what I'll do when I catch that 40 " striper, I can tie 'em on the stringer, but he'd be a load wouldn't he? On second thought, I'll just get the buggy whip out, yell "Home James" and have him tow me back in.

[quikdrive]

Thanks for your input HJS. I need to play around with weights etc to see how much it takes till I start bouncing off the bottom and then go from there. Don't have a lot of experience trolling from a kayak.