By: Rick Greene
Well, I will be the first to admit that we didn’t start this season off with a view to going after invasive species but here we are again dealing with the same issue. I hooked up Rick Courier this morning for what we thought would be a predominantly bass fishing day. As it turned out that was not the case.
We started the day down by Cranberry Brook and the first cast with a LC Sammy netted me a nice 2lb smallie. Funny as it sounds, I don’t have any great faith in the Sammy but my buddy Glen called before I headed out this morning and said to tie one on. He has been having great success with it this year. Forty or fifty casts later I decided that the bait was not a Bass Bait but a Pickerel one. They were all over it and I even had it cut off once on a strike and got it back. The wind got up a bit and the open water top water bite seemed to fade.
While I was fooling around with the Sammy, Rick was going right to town on them with a variety of his favourite Chain Pickerel baits and he was whacking them pretty good as well. He had some great action on a Strike King quad blade spinner bait until the blades got torn off by one to many toothy critters. I was getting them by that time on a Chartreuse Terminator Titanium spinnerbait.
We switched baits numerous times throughout the day and caught fish on Flutter Worms, Blue Fox, Spinnerbaits, Zoom Toads as well as some of Rick’s handpoured surface frogs and stick baits. When we stopped for a bit of lunch our producer Shawn wolfed down his and grabbed a rod and had a go at it as well. He is busy running the camera all day and he doesn’t waste a minute when we are stopped. He caught a couple of real beauts while we ate.
Rick figured we got about 80 Chain Pickerel and five bass. We were mystified about the lack of bass in the area and went into the shoreline for a bit to see if they were still up on beds but they were not. With the water temperature up to 72 surface temp we thought they might be in post spawn which slows them down quite a bit while they recuperate from the spawning ritual.
I was using one of the new Shimano Caenan 100 bait casting reels and it is a beauty. Nice and light with a compact size for comfortable palming of the reel. I had it matched up to a Crucial 6’8″ medium action rod which is fast becoming my favourite for tossing big spinnerbaits. As always for this application I was using 15lb Power Pro. It actually took me a while to get onto this combination. I was having some real issues for a while losing fish on Spinnerbaits which seems a bit odd with the size of hooks but it was costing me. I tried various combinations of line and rods before I settled on these. The lighter baits were thrown on Crucial 6’6″ medium heavy spinning rods, 2500 Stradics and a mix of 15lb Power Pro and 8lb Sufix Seige in green.
All in all it was not a bad days fishing and we had a lot of fun and laughs throughout the day. The problem is that until a few years ago there were no Pickerel in the Magaguadavic River system. Someone introduced them into the lake with no thought to the consequences of their action. We now have another eco system disrupted by a new predatory game fish with no natural checks and balances in the lake and the Pickerel are everywhere from the weedly shorelines to the deepest holes in the lake. There has been a severe decline in the Perch population over the last couple of years as the Pickerel have increased in numbers. Unfortunately they are now being caught all the way down in Lake Utopia as well.
Please do not move fish from one body of water to another.
Recent Comments