Dying Shad

Ouch J, that's not really what I was wanting to hear! I have my last exam of the year on Friday, and I was hoping to hit the river hard next week. Hopefully it will pick back up by then. As others have mentioned, a shad-kill has always been associated with extremely poor fishing for me.

It's also funny that you mention it, but there were quite a few dead shad floating around at Cane Creek on Saturday. It's difficult to determine if there was a shad-kill there as well, since all of those dam ducks (literally hundreds) constantly stay after those shad. It's almost like fishing in the boat with Gooch, all flailing around fighting over food.

CEB -- there were countless dead shad, but the majority (thousands) were just slowly swiming around popping the surface of the water. I'm not sure if that means they were dying, or just stunned and will recover. When I first looked up river and saw all this I thought I was getting ready to limit out in about 10 minutes. LOL. No ducks, but there was a large variety of fish eating birds having a late Thanksgiving. That's what first caught my attention at the boat ramp, seeing all these birds diving into the water.

Hopefully, the river will get back quickley. Good luck on your test Friday.

John Bower,yes,you should freeze all the shad you can.They will be mushy when you thaw them out,but around here thats the ticket for ice-out cats.They sink as they thaw from the ice,and cats and other fish gorge on them ,even over fresh shad.Freeze them in ziplocks maybe 6 per bag so you only thaw what you need.

Just got a vacuum sealer last sunday,will experiment with that.

Sunday, on Lake DeGray in Cox Creek, there was what appeared to me to be a school of shad at least 50' long, 10-15' deep and probably only as wide as the deepest part of the channel (15-20' wide). They were stationed there between two brushpiles suspended just off the bottom in the channel. They didn't move and I never saw any of them surface. My sonar unit with the water temp feature was out of order, so I was unable to identify the water temp. But, I'm now wondering if it was shad; were they alive, dead or in shock; and could it have been something else like a cloud of debris or even a severe temperature inversion effecting the sonar return.

A few years ago, Conway had a die off just north of the 89 bridge. Before it was discovered what it really was, you could smell the methane or some kind of odor. Gas bubbles by the millions were in an area like the one Darryl described. The concern was there might be some sort of gas line rupture. Divers were dispatched to inspect the area and discovered dead shad decaying on the bottom.