Northeast reservoir fishing - where to begin?

[hominamad]

Hi there - this is my first post here - hoping some people can give me some good tips. As probably obvious from my title, I'm new to this sport. I recently bought a 14' jon boat which I'm keeping on a local reservoir here in New York. My son *** is really into fishing, and we were very excited to get out on the boat and start catching some fish. I was told that bass are what is mainly to be found here.

 

Well, so far we went out twice, for several hours, and didn't even get a bite. Didn't even see a single sign of life anywhere in the water. I'm trying to figure out what we're doing wrong so I can make some adjustments for next time, and learning as much as I can along the way.

 

The way I look at it, these are the possible options for what we're doing wrong:

 

- Fishing the wrong part of the water

- Not fishing at a good time of day (one time was right at midday, the other time we were fishing until sunset)

- Using the wrong tackle, or using incorrectly

- No fish in the water!?

 

We tried all different areas of the water - mostly near the shorelines, but also tried fishing points, and at the edges of the weeds. There are quite a lot of weeds in some parts - and looks like quite a lot of algae near the shorelines. We tried several different swimbait, chatterbait, as well as a bunch of plastics - Texas rig, wacky rig, etc. I just ordered some small spinners and a few other types, which we haven't tried yet.

 

Can anyone advise me on how they would approach a brand new body of water like this? I know a lot of the "regulars" on the reservoirs here use fish finders for temps and depths, but I have to imagine it's possible to be successful without that?

 

The reservoir is quite big - there is almost 60 miles of shoreline. I was told that the area where we keep our boat is the best fishing in the area, but we haven't gotten a bite yet.

 

Any advice would be much appreciated!

 

 

 

[roadwarrior]

 

[hominamad]

Thanks! Read through this and going to try next time I'm out. Will post back and let you know how it goes.

[Zachh Nute]

In the mornings, I would throw a topwater frog over that grass. as the sun starts to get high in the sky, those bas should still be in the grass and you can catch them in the middle of the grass where it "mats" up. The rig that will catch the fish in the grass is called a "punch rig". I'm not entirely sure how thick that grass is, but you should be able to get away with only using a 1/2oz bullet weight. 

 

Hope this helps!