Full Moon Effects
August 17, 2019
Jeff joined me this morning and it was looking like a great day on the water! I began by searching an area right at the start for sturgeon but was unsuccessful at locating any numbers. Not to waste any more time, I decided to head to open water for some smallies.
With overcast skies and occasional sunny spots, I made my way over to a shallow, rocky flat hoping for a few big bites. The wind wasn’t helping much as it was out of the east and messing up the current we were fishing. The fish ended up positioning themselves in different areas, but I eventually found them. Jeff hooked a smaller one casting a swim jig while I was fan casting open water with a more aggressive presentation. It was a tough early bite with the moon having just set and I soon realized that we were going to have to fish slower.
Jeff tried a bunch of things including a spybait, but most were unsuccessful. At one point I had him toss a topwater to an area that usually holds good ones and he did manage to hook into a couple. The first one crushed the bait but the second one had it in the top of his head. This showed me that they didn’t really want the lures and it was time to change to the soft plastics. At one point, we were just using the current to drift the baits with barely any movement. This gave us several more fish with the dead weight pickups. It was looking like it was going to be a slow down kind of day!
Our next spot was a little deeper and we were going to be casting drop shots for hopefully bass & walleye. Jeff nailed a bass almost immediately, but we never caught another fish. A few missed bites was all she wrote! Time for another change again!
The inactivity of everything was definitely visible as I barely saw any fish or bird movement. Usually the sturgeon are jumping everywhere but I could count on one hand the number of fish I saw breach. It was going to be a struggle for a while just to get a few bites!
I decided to try steep breaks and different lures to see if we could bring anything up. When this failed we moved up on the shallows again and began covering water. This too failed and Jeff began to slowly work a drop shot instead. To give you an idea of how inactive the fish were, after casting he answered a text without even moving his line. When he was done and started to reel, he felt weight and set on what turned out to be the best fish of the day. Thinking we might be on to something, I began making a few adjustments for the balance of the area we were fishing.
Unfortunately, our day was about to be cut short when he received a phone call and some bad news! Not to get into details, we packed everything up and headed back to take out. Unforeseen circumstances had us pulling off the water early.
The bite may have been slow this morning, but Jeff was enjoying catching bass on a new body of water. He generally fishes the upper St. Lawrence, closer to Lake Ontario and was quite familiar with river smallies. I’m sure that if it had of been anyone else in the boat today that the results would have been different. Too bad about the short day but it was the right thing to do!
