I got back from Lake Erie Saturday morning around 3am and set my alarm for 9am. I had made plans to fish with Russ long before I had made plans to fish up on Lake Erie, so sleep would have to wait. Saturday morning Russ and I decided to head out and hit the river in search of channel cats. Our kayak war team has lost a little steam lately and 2nd place is slowly but surely sneaking up on us. We figured we'd spend the day racking up channel cat points to help give us a little more distance on the leader board. We loaded up the yaks and hit the road around 11:30am. We got on the water at 12:30pm and noticed one key issue....water temperatures. We had been doing well all spring at the warm water discharge when the river was ice cold. Water temperatures in the creek averaged 70 degrees and the river was in the low 40's. Well that was a month ago and now the creek was in the mid 90's and the river was in the upper 40's to low 50's.
We didn't think much of it at first but after nearly 3 hours without a fish I began to reconsider my options. I could sit in the creek all day and see if I could find a few channel cats or I could go out in the river and see what was interested in feeding out in the cooler water. I told Russ that I was going to head out to the river two times and both times he said nothing. I was trying to get a read on what he was feeling about the situation but he wasn't showing any emotion. The decision was mine to make, and I eventually tied on
Smack Tackle's flitterbait on one rod and a white curly tail grub paired with a 3/8oz jig on the other. I pulled anchor and started to paddle toward the Ohio River, and to my amazement Russ began to follow. (I later discovered that he thought about staying in the creek and working both sides while I was out in the river, which is why he didn't let me know what he was thinking. Its a good think he followed me to the river though.......)
We got out into the river and the water temperature was still in the upper 80's near the mouth of the creek. We initially noticed a ton of gar breaching the surface with a few other fish busting baitfish in the mix. I think the fish were using the hot water near the surface to stun and kill shad, as we witnessed several fish floating near the surface. (Not only shad but small crappie, small largemouth, baby carp, etc.) Russ and I anchored up and went to work with the flitterbaits. On the first few casts I noticed what seemed like gar bites. I'd lift the bait off of bottom and feel the "thump", I'd set the hook but nothing was ever there. A few casts later I found my target species.
Normally I'd ask Russ or whomever to take a picture of me and a 20" hybrid striper, but after the fish I've caught this year I think I'm raising my standards a little. I snapped this picture for our kayakwar team and sent it back down to the depths.
Russ and I continued to work our flitterbaits along the bottom, hooking and losing a gar here and there. Every now and then we'd hook into something right on bottom after the bait had set there for a second or two that we were certain was foul hooked because we just couldn't do anything with them. We'd fight them for a minute or two and then they'd throw our hooks. A half an hour later I hooked into another good fish, and this one wasn't foul hooked. I felt a tap on the lift of the flitterbait and I swung hard to bury the hook but I missed the fish, and as I was reeling in the slack from the missed hook set I got hammered again. This time around the hook found its mark.
It went 21.5" and I'd guess it to be every bit of 4.5 to 5lbs. This one was big enough to try for the selfie shot, but not quite big enough to bother Russ who was working his flitterbait 20 yards upstream.
I snapped a few pics and let the fish go on its way. No more than ten minutes later I set the hook on another fish that had hit my bait at the top of my lift. This fish was solid, it wasn't the drag ripping fight of a hybrid but I knew it had some weight to it. After a 2 to 3 minute battle I bring a nice sized drum to the surface.
At this point I look over to Russ and tell him its a good thing we left the creek. In a little under an hour I had landed 3 hybrid stripers (2 pictured above and 1 smaller one.) and this drum. Although it seems that the fishing was one sided, it was not. Russ had also found his grove. I'm not quite sure how he does it, but he managed to catch 3 channels within 30 minutes all on the flitterbait. I've fished this spot with flitterbaits nearly a dozen times this year and I've yet to bring up anything with whiskers. Russ on the other hand has proven himself to be quite efficient at catching catfish on bass baits.
Above he's fighting a 25" channel cat in swift current, just before he realizes he's a little sunburned.
Below he's fighting a 26" channel cat in swift current, just after I tell him he should probably put his long sleeve shirt back on.
His standards for channel cats are pretty high, so he won't let me take any pictures of him with his 26" channel cats. Now that I think about it, we are becoming very spoiled.
Russ went on to catch 7 channel cats on the flitterbait, all of which were hooked right in the mouth. About two hours before dark Russ paddled over to the bank to stand up, stretch his legs, and toss the cast net a few times to see if we could get a few shad for bait. While he was on the bank I hooked into a freight train of a fish. I fought it for a solid five minutes before I realized I had tail hooked a carp. I spent another five minutes trying to get it close enough to my kayak to net. Eventually I won the battle and brought the chunky 23.5" mirror carp into my kayak.
After a few casts with the throw net Russ decided to head back out and continue using the flitterbait. Thirty minutes later, Russ hooked into a solid fish. I honestly thought he had snagged a carp like I had because it just wasn't budging. He brought it withing 10 feet of the yak and then he realized he was hooked. He started throwing water everywhere, at this point I kept telling myself that Russ has finally gotten his first GIANT hybrid on a flitterbait. To our surprise he had hooked a giant drum, it was his new personal best so he wasn't complaining.
We fished the river until 11pm and then decided to call it quits for the evening. We didn't do too bad considering the fact that we spent the first half of the day getting skunked. Russ ended up with 100 kayak war points for our team and I had 50.
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