Thread: Fishing Plans for coming year discussion

Mr, just some information that may or may not make any sense to you or anyone else here. Since you may be going after large catfish, will give you some weird stuff that happened to me at the Santee Cooper lake years ago. My friend had a pontoon, at fall, water getting cold and the shad were balling up. We decided to troll on his pontoon, 3mph minimum with his 4 stroke with some lures looking for stripers. Not much luck until I dug out a 'Hot-n-tot' out of the bottom of my tackle box. It has a very special wobble. So, all at once we caught two nice Blue catfish in about 15 minutes running through the shad schools. Found another of this lure in my tackle box, and proceeded to catch 6 more Blues from 6-30 lbs. What surprised me is that these cats would chase a bait at this trolling speed. May not work for you, but they continued to work for us during the cold weather

Originally Posted by perchjerker108

Mr, just some information that may or may not make any sense to you or anyone else here. Since you may be going after large catfish, will give you some weird stuff that happened to me at the Santee Cooper lake years ago. My friend had a pontoon, at fall, water getting cold and the shad were balling up. We decided to troll on his pontoon, 3mph minimum with his 4 stroke with some lures looking for stripers. Not much luck until I dug out a 'Hot-n-tot' out of the bottom of my tackle box. It has a very special wobble. So, all at once we caught two nice Blue catfish in about 15 minutes running through the shad schools. Found another of this lure in my tackle box, and proceeded to catch 6 more Blues from 6-30 lbs. What surprised me is that these cats would chase a bait at this trolling speed. May not work for you, but they continued to work for us during the cold weather

I'll go ya one better, PJ .... my Grandpa told me of a guy that fished Herrington, pulling a Bomber lure (like pictured below) behind a flatbottom wooden boat with a 10hp motor @ WOT ... and catching monster catfish. (Now I don't know about the "WOT" part, but he was a church going Baptist & not prone to lying about stuff, so )

Pappie, yep, the Hot-N-Tot has a similar style as your picture. We used a silver/black at Santee. Used these for the few years I was there before moving back to KY. Seemed to work most of the time when we found the 'pods' of shad during late fall and cold weather for the Blue Cats. Could not get the Stripers to hit this bait. We had to use live shiners (long lining/drifting for the Stripers).(3-5 inch). Same thing, the stripers were in the middle of shad 'pods'. You could see their large arches in the electronics in the middle of the shad pods. Once you saw this on your electronics, just a matter of seconds/minutes before you got bit.

To all, giving this post a 'bump'. Like to keep this going since we are mostly home wishing we were fishing during this cold weather and I'm sure we all have our best proposed plans to fish this coming year and I suspect most on this site would like to hear from you For my interest only, if anyone has some good suggestions for bank/dock fishing areas for the upcoming year, I would appreciate the advice/location. I do fish the FINS lakes and really appreciate our State for stocking these lakes/ponds, but most do not have many decent bluegill/crappie, just trout/catfish.

Well I did something new this week I had been wanting to do for a long time. Hit the Cumberland river below wolf creek dam while they were generating. Went twice, 2 walleye, 3 trout and a smallie. Great fun! Going back after some stripers.

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My plans are to fish more and make a trip to Dale Hollow for a fishcation to try some of the trolling techniques I learned from Capt. Steve (kyfishman).

Sparkysteve, good luck with the stripers. Just my opinion only, but I think you will need some nice size shiners for these if you can find a bait shop that has them this time of year. Get some serious weights, and drop them down to their range and drift. I marked my poles with a 1 foot length on the rod, placed them in a rod holder, bait just contacting the water and dropped/pulled/peeled from the reel (example 15 times for 15') to get to where they showed up on the electronics and drifted through them. Don't know if this will work below the dam at Cumberland with the current and unknown depth they may be at.

I plan to fish my old D.A.M. Quick reels this year.
D.A.M. Quick Microlite (265) (1961-1967) on Berkley Cherrywood HD CWD2-561ULS and D.A.M. Quick 110 (1967-1974) on Fenwick HMX56UL-MFS.
I took the 110 out yesterday. It was cold out and I don't think the 110 likes the cold. It will take a little getting used to, but I feel like it's going to be a lot of fun.

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Ok, will post my plans for the upcoming year. I'd like to go to KY/Barkley for a week. I no longer have a boat, so I plan to hire a guide for 2-3 days in early to late May. This is on my 'bucket' list. 3 days, no hassle, enjoying the day with someone who enjoys fishing as much as I do. I don't care what I catch, just want to get out and enjoy the time on the lake. I will need to find a guide that is flexible. Example, I have NO SET preference what they 'guide' for. I like anything when fishing, from catfish, yellow bass, LM Bass, Bluegill, Shellcrackers, and especially Crappie. Will need to find a guide that will take me out for whatever is biting at the time during this period. I may try to find an area to bank fish during the week. I always liked the area below Barkley at the place where Barges come in, but they have this area 'Blocked' with the dang 'BAFF' system for the Carp.

I plan to do two things this year.

One is to start removing the stunted bluegills from my 1/4 acre pond behind the house. I've owned this house for 20 years and never removed any fish other than the golden shiners that were in it when I bought it. It took about two years to eliminate them. The local group of raccoons were always grateful when I pitched one up on the bank. I'm sure they will appreciate the bluegills as well.

The second thing if my health holds out is to take a trip to Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee. I've been there a half a dozen times, but just to sightsee, never fish.