First of all I’m very new to this so if this is common knowledge please excuse my post! I went fishing this weekend and started out just dropping live herring down with a 2 oz. weight. When I did not get any bites I was lazy, I started moving my boat around with my baits still out. While moving around trying to find fish I had a bite on the dragged herring. I kept using this approach and had one of my best weekends ever. I was supposed that the stripers were striking these drowned herring but it worked for me. It seemed like everyone else was having a slow weekend
I went out late last night and caught 1 striper on a buck tail and two on a broken back Rapalla. One of the larges stripers I have caught got hooked in the side from the treble hook on the Rapalla. I guess it’s better to be lucky than good sometimes!
If my fishing depended on skill rather than luck I would not fair too well.
If you have the bait at the right level and hit schools of fish they are goind to bite. You probably were in the thermocline and just happened to find the fish. This works great.
Were you seeing anything on your ff(trees, fish, etc) or just blindly pulling the baits around?
I was marking fish in the 15-25 feet range. The strikes seemed to occur about 50% of the time when I was marking and 50% out the fish would come out of nowhere.
Googled it for ya… and my under standing of it is that it’s a highly oxygenated layer as well…
Thermocline
a transition layer between deep and surface water
The thermocline is the transition layer between the mixed layer at the surface and the deep water layer. The definitions of these layers are based on temperature.
The mixed layer is near the surface where the temperature is roughly that of surface water. In the thermocline, the temperature decreases rapidly from the mixed layer temperature to the much colder deep water temperature.
The mixed layer and the deep water layer are relatively uniform in temperature, while the thermocline represents the transition zone between the two.
A deeper thermocline (often observed during El Niño years) limits the amount of nutrients brought to shallower depths by upwelling processes, greatly impacting the year’s fish crop.
Yankee sand flea on a Southern beach.
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Thanks starrstriper,
I went out last night for about and hour and a half and had no luck around the towers at Lake Murray but found lot’s of fish about 2 miles west. A blue broke back Rappala is working well for me!
You can also identify the thermocline using a good ff.
Set the sensitivity way up (around 93% on a lowrance) and you can see it on the screen. Its’ depth remains constant. You can place your bait just over it, just under it, or in the middle to find out where the bite is.
Good luck
