Fall football...

Haven't fished too much this week, trying to get things done around the house since much of next month will be spent up a tree chasing whitetails. Tonight was just too pretty an evening not to sneak out for an hour. On a 1/8th ounce jighead and Coomer 3 inch smoke metalflake grub fished on six pound test since the river is as clear as it ever gets. In about three feet of water next to current and about thirty yards up from the deepest slowest hole in this section of river

Monster!!!!

I go over the last little rise in the path where I can see the river. What the??? Yep there is a guy fishing the spot. My spot. A spot that has produced as many big fish for me as anywhere. I watch for a bit. He's got nice tackle, a backpack, expensive waders. He's even fashionable.... #$@%
I back slowly away. If the river was 70 degrees I might wander down and say hi but it's that last bit of the good stuff. When you fish those special places you have spent years sniffing out. Those places you keep tucked away for just a couple weeks each fall that you wouldn't tell your sister about. %$#^&
Okay plan B. Back to the car and I drive downstream to another not so good spot. Little did I know the fish god was about to reward me. I just walked down made a dozen casts and then Thump. Hey this seems like a pretty good fish. I'm actually thinking big saugeye till it jumps. A beautiful cover of field and stream jump. Just a fraction past the 20 inch mark on my rod. One of the nicest fish of the entire year. It's funny as big as she looks in that photo it really doesn't do her justice. On a Vic Coomer paddleswim fished on a 1/4 ounce jighead in about six feet of water below right below some faster shallow water and about a good long cast upstream of a big eddy where she will spend the winter. It was a pretty swell walk back to the car under a gorgeous full moon as dark began to fall...

a bit of fishing

So yeah I hadn't posted any fishing pictures in like a week and a half or two. I guess you fish too much when people start messaging you asking if you are all right. Then I got a few messages like hey I'm really catching fish, if you want you can come here and I can help you... The truth is with the fall bite delayed by all the warm weather at the beginning of the month the peak fishing hit right when bowhunting started. So every moment has been spent hunting or fishing or unloading hunting stuff and loading fishing stuff or vice versa and just trying to cram it all in. So here is a photo dump of fishing photos from the last seven or eight days. The fishing has just been outstanding with smallmouth murdering a big triple wing buzzbait at first then a Vic Coomer paddleswim as the water cooled off. I also wasted a few days chasing one fish, I hooked and lost twice off the same rock two days apart as big a smallmouth as I've ever seen around here so I hammered that spot for a few days with no luck. Except for the Ohio River the four other streams I fished are as low and clear as I've ever seen them this time of year. One of the highlights was a trip where the sun was hitting the water just right and I could sight fish smallmouth, stalking and casting to them and watching two fish fight over who was going to get to the lure first. Low point was ripping a six inch gash in my waders tonight on the wrong side of a 53 degree river I had to wade across up to my waist a mile from the car. Luckily I did have some hunting clothes in the car and I stripped naked in the parking lot. Again luckily no one pulled in right then. I found quite a few hybrids in the Ohio river from about a half pound up the ones you see in the photos. No giants but a lot of fun midday between hunting trips. Speaking of giants it's the first paddlefish I've seen posted this year so I'll answer the usual comments. It's a paddlefish or spoonbill catfish, whichever you want to call it. Yes they are endangered in Ohio and yes I released it. If you fish either below the dams or out in front of deeper creek mouths in the Ohio river in cold weather you have a good chance of snagging one while trying to catch hybrids or sauger. Once it gets a bit colder there will probably be quite a few posted on here. Every now and then someone even catches one below east fork or ceasars creek dam but the vast majority come from the Ohio. One cool thing about them is sometimes they will even jump two or three times which is what this one did besides trying to completely spool me. Tonight the river was 53 with cold weather forecasted for every day this week so the main peak of the best smallmouth fishing is probably passing though winter can be trophy time. All in all it's been a pretty swell couple weeks.

striped stuff

I thought it might be nice to have a thread of links to information, research, news etc on things stripey. I found when learning to smallmouth fish that the things I had bookmarked on my computer eventually became my most important tool. Over the last couple years as I've started to stripe fish more I'm starting to accumulate a few links on them as well. Here are a few of those. I lean more towards pdf copies of scientific studies, kind of dry reading but absolute goldmines of information if you can stomach them.

http://www.dailyjournal.net/2017/03/11/tracking_wipers/

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/54b7/40af08a9928822cb5d43e746166e18aff227.pdf?_ga=2.149411702.1374382075.1539818675-836677762.1539818675

https://www.nwfsc.noaa.gov/assets/2/7183_07042012_121148_Moser.and.Patrick.2001-rev.pdf

http://www.gma.org/fogm/Roccus_saxatilis.htm

https://www.arkansasstripers.com/striped-bass-references.htm

https://scholarworks.uark.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2613&context=jaas

http://www.nativefishlab.net/library/internalpdf/21309.pdf

https://www.osti.gov/biblio/5704852

file:///C:/Users/Admin/Downloads/EldridgeMaxwellB1989.pdf

https://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/handle/1853/30615/AvyleM-89.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

https://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/bitstream/handle/1840.2/65/Jackson&Hightower_NAJFM.pdf?sequence=1

https://projects.ncsu.edu/project/fish-lab/pdfs/Thompson_Rice_2010.pdf

https://mafiadoc.com/are-marine-migrations-of-striped-bass-genetically-pre-determined_5b4abf7a097c4709638b45b1.html

https://shareok.org/bitstream/handle/11244/14361/Thesis-1987D-M971p.pdf?sequence=1

https://chesapeakebay.noaa.gov/fish-facts/striped-bass

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1443232?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

https://kb.osu.edu/handle/1811/37266

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233114528_Habitat_Use_by_Striped_Bass_in_Relation_to_Seasonal_Changes_in_Water_Quality_in_a_Southern_Reservoir

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233474595_Reservoir_Striped_Bass_Movements_and_Site_Fidelity_in_Relation_to_Seasonal_Patterns_in_Habitat_Quality

https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/bitstream/handle/10919/9884/FinalThesisETD.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2003WR001965

https://gis.ohiodnr.gov/MapViewer/?config=OhioDams

sinkhole

So I found this out in Pike County Ohio during this weeks bowhunt. The top of the hole is about five feet across and it tapers down to about a foot at the waterline. I guess it was probably seven feet down to the water from where I stood at the edge of the hole. I'll admit I was pretty nervous standing on the edge filming. It was maybe a 100 feet from a small stream that had three or four inches of water in it that fed into a larger creek about a mile up from it's confluence with the Scioto River. There seemed to be a lot more water in this hole than in the creek that's for sure. There was no houses or anything within a mile of it. pretty scarey I thought.

the last few days in fishing...

It was supposed to be a hunting trip with a bit of fishing. I don't know at what temperature hunting quits being fun but I do know the upper 80's is definitely way past that point. So it ended up being a little bit of scouting and stand placement with a whole lot of fishing. In the past week I've had a bad streak of smallmouth coming off, losing three big fish. I don't think I'd lost three big fish all year and it was in my head a bit. This fish hammered my curly shad and I set the hook several times before she hurtled skyward. It was obvious on the jump she wasn't just a Fish Ohio but probably would have qualified under the older harder rules. I have to admit after the first jump I stuck the rod tip underwater every time she even hinted at jumping. I usually never do that loving to watch them jump but I wanted this fish badly. After a few blistering runs she actually came to hand without any drama.
The biggest hybrid hammered a topwater right after daylight peeling line off in a long run that felt like it would never end. In the first scenery photo after the fish pics you can see where a clear stream runs into a big muddy river. The difference between the clear water and the muddy water was just about the biggest I've ever seen. Every fishing spot gets a name. And this spot will always be The Meeting of Waters, named after the spot where the Rio Negro meets the Amazon in Brazil. Right where the clear water plows into the muddy water and makes a hard right turn downstream was where I caught every hybrid and the occasional nice white bass on topwaters and curly shads. After making the hard right turn the clear water ran downstream without mixing with the muddy water for at least a quarter mile. Unfortunately I couldn't find a safe place to wade across and fish more of it tho I occasionally could see fish blowing up knocking shiners into the air. It ended up being a pretty lousy hunting trip but a pretty great fishing trip...