CHill Fishing Report

Cody Hill

Fall is in the air and when it was raining Saturday morning it sure felt like fall.  Even though the temperatures are starting to drop it doesn’t mean that the fish have quit feeding and it seems like it was quiet the opposite. Last week the fish were 2-3 feet off bottom and roaming chasing baitfish, not this weekend though.

Weather was majorly definitely different from a week ago and the fish were roaming last weekend but this weekend they were hugging structure waiting for food to come to them.  If you found fish, you can about guarantee that the fish were associating with some kind of weeds and in some cases, it was just a random tall weed on a flat.  

Fishermen can sometimes get too stuck on a spot, depth, or area to fish and I feel that was me on Saturday. Fish were there last week, and they were there instantly on Saturday, but at 10:30 a.m. the fish were not there anymore.  I moved and covered water at a second spot and would find random fish but nothing like we were catching instantly on Saturday.  Sunday, I started on the “good” spots, and we couldn’t buy a bite, so we changed our game plans and went searching in the weeds for the fish and it didn’t take long to realize that was the right move.

Livescope is a great tool in the boat and Sunday when we started focusing on the weeds all the fish were holding tight to the edges of the weed line, but they rarely went more than 20 feet past the weed line. All the fish I marked on Livescope were one of two places, either the top of the weeds or at the base of the weeds.  After we caught on to that we focused strictly on barely ticking the top of the weeds and it didn’t take long before the net was getting a workout.

A simple lead 1/16 oz jig and a fat head worked best but when it got windier a 1/8 oz helped with feeling the bites in the wind.  A friend recommended using hair jigs, so I gave it a shot right away but after I had lost my 4th jig in less than a half hour, I switched back to the plain jig head and quit going through jigs as often.  Color of the jig didn’t seem to matter and something that Livescope showed was don’t be afraid to get aggressive randomly with your jigging sequence.  We had a lot of followers chase us but when we’d do an aggressive jig with a big fall it almost always guaranteed a bite on the drop.

Long range forecast shows that we still have some nice weather in the forecast, and it still isn’t too late to get out on the water to make memories that will last a lifetime.  It also is not that far out to be thinking of early ice fishing trips.