The Good Hope Bay sample was very interesting as usual. It is always great to get to the other end of the lake. We ran a young-of-year survey in one of the no name side canyons opposite Ticaboo in Good Hope. The catch of bluegill and largemouth was normal as expected when the backs of canyons are brushy. These species showed up in decent numbers. The surprise was very few smallmouth. But that is explained by habitat. If we had shocked mostly rocks instead of mostly brush the results would have been different.
Now for the exciting news! The biggest surprise was number of crappie. A normal sample in a good year would be 10-50 crappie in a night consisting of 4 shocking runs (15 minutes each). That number collected was off the charts with about 200 per run. The last run produced over 440 crappie. That run alone may exceed the total number of crappie collected in GHB electrofishing surveys over the past 2 decades. Wow! It looks really good for crappie in GHB for the next 4 years.
Gizzard shad were collected in about equal numbers with the crappie. Size was 3-4 inches making these fish young-of-year. The race is now on to see if these shad grow another inch or two before winter, which takes them out of the forage race for most game fish. Or they could stay where they are and provide great forage over winter and next spring.
All these fish were in good shape and in great numbers making for a very gratifying survey. Unfortunately the equipment bugged out after that making it necessary to cancel the Bullfrog and Rincon stations.
Good Hope Fishing – After a long night of shocking we got up early and fished our way to Hite. We saw no boils in the morning hours. We trolled up a few stripers near Castle Butte, Scorup and mouth of Trachyte. The pattern was medium (DD Pointers and shad raps) to deep (Deep Thunderstick) runners. Medium worked OK early and deep later. Speed was over 4 MPH for best results. We caught about 2-3 fish per spot and then moved on when they quit. It was not fast but gratifying to catch a striper again after a long southern drought.
Fish were fat and very healthy. Shad in stomachs were small and probably threadfin but too decomposed to tell for sure.
We then buzzed a few rattletraps across the tree tops on main channel islands located by brush tree tops waving to us as we went by. We caught stripers, walleye and smallmouth in the trees on fast moving traps.
Other fish reports from the area: Most folks were trolling but going quite slow and only catching 0-3 fish per boat. They did not go down lake past Farleys to spots where our fish were caught. The best trolling results came with leaded line (4 colors) while towing a (hyper striper) stump jumper. This group had as may fish as we did.
There were still some folks that towed harvested fish on a stringer in the 78 degree water. There are much better ways to keep stripers fresh.
The BEST REPORT came from Ticaboo Canyon. Mike Daniels and family were fishing day and night. They used anchovy bait at the mouth of Ticaboo (first bend) under green lights and caught 60 stripers. Night fishing may be the way to go in these tough fishing times.
