I fished Kiser Lake Saturday morning with Neil, Jeff, and Brian. I quickly unloaded the kayak and got on the water. I put one foot in the water and darn near lost my breath, I was pretty sure my body was telling me that it was still too early in the morning for that kind of shock. We decided to start on the shallow end of the lake and target schooling baitfish. It didn’t take very long to find them either. The water looked like glass since the wind was pretty much nonexistent at this point. Any commotion near the surface was fairly easy to see from a hundred yards away. Neil was the first to land a fish off of a bait ball, a small 14” largemouth on a spinnerbait. The action seemed to die off after that. We kept paddling around the shoreline looking for any signs of baitfish near the surface. Eventually I tied on a hollow body frog and worked the remaining lily pads. About an hour passed and we decided to head up toward the deeper end of the lake to see if the fish were schooling bait up there too. After 2 hours of searching we were fairly confident the answer to our question was NO, the fish weren’t schooling fish near the deeper water. Neil did lose a good one right at the kayak throwing a 10" worm. It looked like the bass was acting out of reaction and didn't really have time to eat the worm. At this point we met up with Jeff and Brian and started talking about what we had caught and where we had caught them. They had done significantly better than us, landing almost a dozen fish to our 1. Even while we were talking Jeff landed a small bass. I shook my head and asked him what he had caught that on and he replied, “That blade bait you gave me this morning.” He was referring to Smack Tackle’s Flitterbait. I already had one tied on at this point and I was alternating in between it and the hollow body frog. I was tossing the flitterbait into schools of baitfish and then working the frog when the baitfish weren't present. I must have been doing something wrong, or maybe I was just in the wrong spots. After a little discussion we figured out that almost all of our fish had come from the shallow portion of the lake, so we set off back toward the area we had come from. I paddled up to a group of isolated lily pads and threw the flitterbait along the edge. On the first cast I snagged a lily pad stalk. On my second cast I retrieved the bait a little faster as to keep the bait a little higher in the water column. I started reeling just fast enough to feel the flitterbait vibrating through my rod blank, and then at about the same spot I snagged in before, the vibration stopped. Fearing that I had another lily pad, I tried to rip the bait free by jerking the rod violently. This time around I hadn’t found a lily pad stem, instead a small 13” bass rocketed out of the water. I kind of felt bad for the poor fish, I rarely set hooks that hard even on jig and pigs. At least I was on the board now.
A few minutes later, I landed another bass from the lily pad
edge. For the next couple hours I landed fish after fish, all coming from lily
pad edges. That was the key to finding fish, find bait and cover and you found bass. At one point I even started pitching the flitterbait into pockets
inside of the pads, hopping it a couple times and then moving on. At about noon
I made a long cast along a pad line and started burning the bait back to the
kayak. I hit a pocket of weeds and ripped the bait free, and then started
reeling again. I then felt a thump and watched as my line started heading away
from the pads. I set a hook and saw the fish turn near the surface. He then
swam toward my kayak and dropped my flitterbait off for me. I don’t know
exactly how big it was or even what species it was, but I was pretty upset. We
fished for another hour before decided to pack up and grab some lunch.
From there Neil and I decided to head up to Indian Lake and try to catch a few saugeye near the dam. We got on the water a little after 4pm and fished until dark. We put our kayaks in near a group of islands and quickly discovered that we had to go under a very low bridge, or paddle a half mile around the islands. Well the pictures should tell the rest of that story.
I
went first in the Native Watercraft Slayer from Whitewater Warehouse.
The seat was in the low position, because I felt too unstable in the
high seating position. The bridge was so low that I actually had to get
out of the seat and sit in the floor of the kayak. That's when I kicked a
scupper plug out and let a bunch of water in, which made its way back to where I
was sitting. Wet butt and all, we paddled up to a good looking bank and
started casting
toward rip rap. About 20 casts into the trip and I land my first saugeye, a 16.5”er
that took
a chartreuse flitterbait.
We then paddled around a little, but we didn’t pick up
another fish for an hour. I was starting to think that the hot bite was color
related, because I had lost my chartreuse flitterbait to a snag after my
first fish. At that point I made the switch to the black back shad color.
Previously I had favored the black back shad color, it was probably the
most realistic looking bait that I had ever seen. I had used it in the
early spring to catch hybrid striped bass, so my confidence was still
pretty high. After an hour of unsuccessful fishing we tucked back into a cove where I found some
lily pads. My initial thought was….well I guess I could always bass fish again. I
started throwing the flitterbait along the pad edges and quickly hooked up with
another fish. It was no bass this time around either, I quickly landed another
saugeye at 17.5”.
At this point I had noticed Neil had abandoned the shallow cove and was
trolling out in the main lake. I decided to head out and tell him that I had just caught another saugeye in pretty shallow water. He told me that he hadn't had a bite while trolling the deep water so he decided to target shallow water too. At that point we decided to spend the rest of the evening on the shallow flats near the dam. Which turned out to be a pretty good idea, as I landed another 17.5” saugeye a half an hour before sunset.
At the end of the day I was pretty happy with the way the trip turned out. Although I lost a good fish at Kiser Lake, the saugeye more than made up for the trip.
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