KenLattimore Posted June 4, 2012 Posted June 4, 2012 Managed to get out on both Saturday and Sunday morning, both days I fished from 6-11:00. Saturday was tough after the thunderstorms we had on Friday. The water was pretty stirred up. Met Kevin I. over by the stickups and we fished for a couple of hours with no luck, but saw plenty of carp spawning and splashing all over the place right up to the bank. We decided to go over to the tubes thinking with all the carp splashing around it might be having a negative effect on the bass bite. At the tubes I threw a weightless senko and got a nice hit. I set the hook and it felt like I had Moby Dick! It was heavy and took three good runs where it peeled a few feet of line, which really surprised me since the max drag on my reel is 11lbs. I didn't have it locked down, but estimate it was set somewhere around 8 lbs. I thought I had the bass of a lifetime, as I yelled to Kevin to see if he brought his net! After several minutes that seemed to last forever I finally was able to bring the fish up. It was a huge catfsh! It was at least 26-28" and probably 12-15 lbs. Kevin estimated at 20lbs, but I don't think it was that heavy. With all the excitement I totally forgot to take a picture. After all the excitement was over Kevin caught a small bluegill which I promptly livelined and caught a LM which was around 15". Sunday wasn't nearly as exciting. I caught a LM around 15-16" on my second cast and I thought it was the beginning of a great day. Alas, it wasn't meant to be because I caught nothing for the rest of the day. Quote
Super User BrianinMD Posted June 4, 2012 Super User Posted June 4, 2012 Ken, I never saw a catfish that big come out of BH. I know it wasn't what you were going for but nice catch! Have a tourney there this saturday, will be interesting to see now much weight it will take to win it. I am predicting 22 pounds for boaters 16 pounds for co-anglers. Quote
KenLattimore Posted June 4, 2012 Posted June 4, 2012 Ken, I never saw a catfish that big come out of BH. I know it wasn't what you were going for but nice catch! Have a tourney there this saturday, will be interesting to see now much weight it will take to win it. I am predicting 22 pounds for boaters 16 pounds for co-anglers. It was definitely surprising. During the fight I even had a little crowd gathered around to see what it was. I wish I would have taken a picture. I did a little research on what kind of catfish it may may been and think it may have been a channel catfish. It was greyish black with a white underbelly. Good luck this Saturday and save some fish for the rest of us! Quote
micorps Posted June 4, 2012 Posted June 4, 2012 micorps, I carry several brands of lipless cranks. I've had the most success with RatLTraps but I also throw Cotton Cordell Super Spots, Strike King Red Eye Shad, XCalibur One Knockers and the Norman lipless (can't remember the name off the top of my head). My theory behind carrying several brands is each brand has their own unique sound (and in some cases, a different profile). So if I figure out there's a decent lipless crank bite on, I can tweak things until I give them the one they like the best. Generally I stick with 1/2oz models but I've added 1/4oz and 3/4oz to my arsenal as well. That has proved to be a valuable addition on a few outings. I will add that I've built my collection up over several years so I'm not breaking the bank putting the collection together. Hope this helps some! If you have any questions, let me know and I'll help out the best I can. Sweet, cabelas just had a blow out sale on one knockers and bought every size and color. Havent been able to use them yet, but will be spending a month in MN on my way out. You are absolutely correct, i have alot of lipless cranks also for the very reasons you mentioned. When I arrive, we will need to do some fishing and I can let you use some that I have good luck with also. I also bought some Yo Zuri rattle n vibes, live target gizzed shad traps, and Lucky Craft Pro Tune LVR Series. Looking forward to using these and seeing how they do. Quote
basser89 Posted June 4, 2012 Author Posted June 4, 2012 I was able to get out this afternoon for a couple hours so I hit Black Hills. Started at the stick ups and had a few hits, one felt HEAVY and managed one around 2lbs. All bites were on an Electric Blue Culprit worm. The first one that hit, hit the bait on the fall (using a 1/4oz bullet weight to give you an idea of the fall rate). Once that happened, I decided to go with an aggressive retrieve hopping the bait hard and high to let them hit on the fall which paid off with more hits and that 2 pounder. Things seemed to die down so I moved back around the corner and tried throwing the worm again, unfortunately, the wind was kickin so decided to switch things up and go with a lipless crank. That paid off with a pair of dinks and several hook ups both never landed those. When the wind would die down for a little while, I'd switch back up to the worm and picked up a few more hits. I had upped the weight to compensate for the wind. Kept with the same retrieve which is what triggered the hits. The Powell Diesel rod I ordered did show up today (picked it up after the outing). I'm impressed with it so far! It's lighter than my Tour spinnerbait rod and feels plenty of back bone to boots. Can't wait to test it out (weather permitting). Going to use this rod primarily as my frogging rod with will also be used as a jig rod on the side as well. As I get some outings under my belt with it, I'll post a review on it in the rod section. Quote
Fat Boy Posted June 5, 2012 Posted June 5, 2012 Sean, I have a Powell flipping/pitching rod and I love it. Great quality. Glad to see you getting out again. Great report guys, and nice kitty Ken! I was at BH for the afternoon on Saturday, above the tubes looked like coffee and there were spots on the main lake that looked murky, but considering that everything within 20 miles was chocolate, that wasn't too bad. I actually like that water color. Alas, I wasn't bass fishing though. My buddy and I spent the entire afternoon/evening targeting tiger muskies. No hits and no follows tossing musky baits. We each caught a nice bass, me with a 19" largemouth on a 10" Grandma lure (musky crankbait) and my buddy with a 17-18" bass caught on a musky sized spinner. Other than a few largemouth follows and attempted strikes on the musky lures, that was it for the action. My buddy Dave caught 10 bass that day but worked hard for them with his biggest going 19" even. Half were dinks, the rest decent size, all on plastic worms and creature baits. Anyone seeing any tiger muskies this year, by the way? I had one nearly take a dink bass from me a couple weeks ago. Quote
TheKingFisher Posted June 5, 2012 Posted June 5, 2012 micorps and basser89, You guys are getting me pumped to start throwing lipless cranks again! micorps it sounds like you've got all the good stuff. I love those one knockers and had loaded up a bunch in my cart for the cabelas sale but forgot about them and ended up missing out. I also like the yozuri rattle n vibes a lot. This year I lost a lot of crankbaits after Ken turned me on to the stickups at Black Hills. d**n him! That's a definite high risk fishing spot as far as lipless cranks go! Oh yeah Ken, I did say that catfish was between 15 and 20 pounds. I knew he was into something big, because I've never heard him ask for a net before! I swear he must've dragged that thing across the bottom as it never surfaced and we didn't see what it was until he landed it at his feet. What a ugly sucker, I can't mess with those things. The skin is just too wierd! Quote
micorps Posted June 5, 2012 Posted June 5, 2012 micorps and basser89, You guys are getting me pumped to start throwing lipless cranks again! micorps it sounds like you've got all the good stuff. I love those one knockers and had loaded up a bunch in my cart for the cabelas sale but forgot about them and ended up missing out. I also like the yozuri rattle n vibes a lot. This year I lost a lot of crankbaits after Ken turned me on to the stickups at Black Hills. d**n him! That's a definite high risk fishing spot as far as lipless cranks go! Oh yeah Ken, I did say that catfish was between 15 and 20 pounds. I knew he was into something big, because I've never heard him ask for a net before! I swear he must've dragged that thing across the bottom as it never surfaced and we didn't see what it was until he landed it at his feet. What a ugly sucker, I can't mess with those things. The skin is just too wierd! King Fisher, While i was deployed (I just returned 2 months ago from Afghanistan), my storage unit was broken into so I am using the insurance settlement to build my new box as they stole mine among many other things. I started with lipless crankbaits as this is my lure of choice and bought the old styles i grew up using on ebay and all they new stuff on cabelas. I have about 10-15 different cranks now. My weapon of choice for bass has always been spinner/buzz baits. Luckily I found a nice lot of 40 on ebay and got those for 40 some dollars. I really want to try out the northland spinner/buzz baits. Always catch fish with their stuff so I assume will be the same case for their bass lures, time will tell. Since we will be in the same area, it would be to easy to set up some fishing on the weekend and you are welcome to try some stuff out to see if it works. I may even have an extra as some of the lots of rapalas I bought had up to 3 of the same lure. I am anxious to try the rapala clackin minnows.. (Dive to a maximum of about 3 ft), the lipless i have work phenominally well in MN. Quote
Super User Munkin Posted June 9, 2012 Super User Posted June 9, 2012 Have a tourney there this saturday, will be interesting to see now much weight it will take to win it. I am predicting 22 pounds for boaters 16 pounds for co-anglers. So what was your clubs winning weight today? I have never seen an armada of bass boats like that at Black Hills before. FOB shirts slinging green finesse worms all over that lake today. Allen Quote
Fat Boy Posted June 11, 2012 Posted June 11, 2012 So what was your clubs winning weight today? I have never seen an armada of bass boats like that at Black Hills before. FOB shirts slinging green finesse worms all over that lake today. Allen According to the FOB website: Boater: 18 lbs. 10 oz.; lunker 4 lbs. 7 oz. Co-Angler: 14 lbs. 5 oz.; lunker 5 lbs. 9 oz. Quote
Basser714 Posted June 11, 2012 Posted June 11, 2012 I was expecting an armada of boats for the recent night fish at BH but it seemed quite the opposite. I landed two both near shore on retrieves. The best was 20" 4.5 on a soft plastic Quote
Super User BrianinMD Posted June 11, 2012 Super User Posted June 11, 2012 Yeah the weights were down from last year, not sure why. Do not remember ever seeing so many boats on bh at one time. The club had 19 but there were a lot of other boats out too. Quote
Fat Boy Posted June 11, 2012 Posted June 11, 2012 After spending a week at Capitol Hill for a training seminar (which was really cool by the way), I was ready for a good trip this weekend. Howard and I planned to plop the ol’ Crawdad into a lake on Maryland's Eastern Shore for a change. Plus, we knew that Black Hills would be a zoo. Temperatures were predicted to be in the upper 80’s to low 90’s, so we knew it would be hot. But, would the fishing be hot? Our goal on this trip was to get into a good largemouth and chain pickerel bite. In the past, chatterbaits and lipless crankbaits have been hot on both species, and I had hoped for a similar bite. After arriving at the ramp and putting in, it wasn’t long that I tied into this chainside on a white chatterbait…it wasn’t a big pickerel, but man do they ever hit hard. Not long after that, I tossed my chatterbait around a big deadfall and hooked into a big largemouth. I’d say it was 3 to 4 pounds or so, but I can’t prove it, because after leaping twice despite my efforts to keep that from happening, the green bass threw my chatterbait back at me in defiance. Yep, that big bass tore me a new one… After that, I tossed hard baits for quite a while without another bite while Howard experimented with various soft plastics and chatterbaits. Neither of us got into them much along the main lake, so we decided to head up the lake into the skinny water. I really like it up there as it’s like the Maryland Bayou with cypress trees everywhere. Sometimes the fishing can be good, and with the temperatures increasing quickly as the sun became higher in the sky, the shady cover of those cypress trees felt pretty good to us. And we thought that the fish would like that as well. So, with the prospect of cooler water and perhaps a little current, we hoped to get into them up there. After tossing chatterbaits all the way up, we both switched to finesse plastics. Well, we found the chain pickerel. I think that I landed about 10 percent of the ones that bit, the rest bit me off or jumped and threw the hook. Meanwhile, Howard got into a zone and began systematically thumping my butt catching one nice largemouth after another, as I kept getting bitten off or catching dinky bass. During that time frame, Howard also lost a big bass that lept a few times and finally took to the cover and broke Howard off. We estimated that bass to be in the 20”+ range, maybe 5 pounds or so. Howard put on a clinic up there on finesse bassin’ After spending some time in the skinny water, we moved back out to the main lake again and worked soft plastics around the cover that we worked with the hard baits earlier. We managed some more bass and pickerel, and eventually I was able to make a comeback. We fished the shady woody cover and the bass were willing once again, chewing on our plastic worms like candy. We didn’t catch a lot, we caught some quality fish. We saw a critter swimming across the lake and determined that it was a raccoon. We caught up to it and I tried to get a picture, but my Droid picked an inopportune moment to act up and prevent my camera from operating properly. I cursed so danged loud when that raccoon got away that the zillion turtles nearby all ducked under the water’s surface all at the same time. Now I was really ticked off about the way the day was going. At least you’d think that the camera would permit me to record something! NOT! Meanwhile, Howard was getting quite a kick out my moment of rage, cracking up at me in the back of the boat… …kind of like earlier up in the Maryland bayou when I tied on a new Zoom Baby Brush Hog and snagged a branch on my backcast, then after peeling that off the limb proceeded to do it again above my head followed by some foul language on my part. As if that wasn’t enough, my next cast to a cypress tree base promptly zoomed right for the middle of the tree 10’ above my projected target, and wrapping around a tree limb. I went ballistic. Thank goodness that St. Croix makes stout rods because I think that I nearly ripped the tree down in my fit of cursing rage. The lure came out at lightning speed and thumped me right in the chest. Howard was in tears laughing, I think. Here’s the first fish of my comeback, not big by any means, but he thought he was a 5 pounder and fought that way…which brought a measure of happiness and calmed me down a bit. Two casts later I tied into this nice one, my biggest largemouth of the day. This fish made me forget all about the raccoon incident. Well, we caught some nice quality bass after that, but nothing picture worthy. I had one more decent bass hit a chatterbait and a nice chain pickerel do the same, nearly ripping the rod from my hand. In summary, we finished a beautiful day with some pretty decent numbers, but we worked our butt off for them. Each of us caught a dozen bass and our share of chainsides. I think that I finished with nine pickerel (out of a zillion bites and bite offs), and we each caught a couple big bull bluegills. I’m not sure how many chain pickerel that Howard caught, but I believe that he caught a few more than I did. I know that he also had a huge one bite him off at the upper end of the lake. I tried to fish my panfish set up a few times, but the pickerel kept biting me off, so I gave up on that. I might as well have dumped my jigs into the lake. The bluegills were feeding on the surface all day across the lake. It probably would have been a grand time with a fly rod and a small popper or dragonfly imitation. 1 Quote
Super User Munkin Posted June 12, 2012 Super User Posted June 12, 2012 Yeah the weights were down from last year, not sure why. Do not remember ever seeing so many boats on bh at one time. The club had 19 but there were a lot of other boats out too. We arrived right as you guys were still putting in. My club is small and we only had 4 boats for this tournament, I was in the in my silver Xpress. Not a bad day but when the sun came up they went deep and I had to find another pattern about 11am. I did win our tournament and while we use some paper weight calculator I had about 16lbs. Allen Quote
Super User BrianinMD Posted June 12, 2012 Super User Posted June 12, 2012 Allen, I remember seeing your boat. I was in the blue Tracker. We came in at 2:30, when we got to the ramp I looked back towards main lake and couldn't believe how many boats were out there. The place was just packed, just made a difficult day fishing harder when trying to find productive water. Our next tourney will be the same most likely. Fishing out of Smallwood on the 23rd, just happens to be the same day as the Bassmaster Weekend series at Smallwood. Quote
Crank Bait Nut Posted June 12, 2012 Posted June 12, 2012 New to the form , I'm Mike , From deep creek lake , I mainly fish the lake here & over in mt storm , WVA. (power plant). I lived in silver spring , Md. Many years back & fished nothing but the tidal rivers , Md , DC , Del & Va. I really miss fishing those rivers , The lake here can be really tough at times. Mike P. Quote
Super User BrianinMD Posted June 13, 2012 Super User Posted June 13, 2012 Welcome Mike Yeah, Deep Creek got tough after the fish kill a couple years ago. I have not been up there this year but my club had a tourney up there and things seemed to be better. Hopefully it continues to improve its a beautiful lake, but I won't go up there during summer. Going out Saturday with a Hellbenderman at Black Hills, wife and kid out out of town. Hopefully find someone to fish with Sunday, so far no luck. Quote
KenLattimore Posted June 13, 2012 Posted June 13, 2012 I plan on going out this Sunday from sunrise till about noon or so, then off to home to spend Father's Day with the family. If anybody is interested in meeting me there let me know! Quote
Super User BrianinMD Posted June 13, 2012 Super User Posted June 13, 2012 Ken, I am still trying to find an empty backseat for Sunday. Being Father's Day it is a little harder, if I don't find a ride I will join you. Quote
basser89 Posted June 13, 2012 Author Posted June 13, 2012 Welcome to THE boards Mike! Kevin, awesome report and great pics too! I'm hoping to get an outing with my Dad this weekend but that's up in the air yet. I might try for a lunch time outing yet this week but that's not for certain. Quote
Super User BrianinMD Posted June 13, 2012 Super User Posted June 13, 2012 I haven't checked the weather but will be going out after work next week a few days. Hopefully catch a decent bite as light fades. Quote
Fat Boy Posted June 15, 2012 Posted June 15, 2012 I'll be on BH tomorrow AM out of my buddy's boat. Hopefully they'll be bitin'! Quote
Bill Poch Posted June 16, 2012 Posted June 16, 2012 I managed to get out and wade the Potomac up by Harpers Ferry tonight after work, Landed 3 smallies ranging about 13 -14" each. Caught on 4" zoom lizard. I really need to get some real wading boots. I'm just wearing leather sandals and managed to slip in fall in working my way back to shore. Lucky it wasn't deep and I caught myself on the rocks. Only my pride was hurt. I was alone and I'm pretty careful when I'm out there by myself, but these things happen. A friend of a friend said he's been crushing them on tubes lately up there. Quote
Super User BrianinMD Posted June 16, 2012 Super User Posted June 16, 2012 Weekend is off to a great start, hit the upper potomac yesterday after work. Lost track of how many smallies we caught. Best part was the popper bite, some outstanding strikes. Today off to black hills to hopefully find some willing largemouth. Quote
Fat Boy Posted June 16, 2012 Posted June 16, 2012 Bill, BPS and Cabelas has some nice wading boots. They help on slippery rocks especially if you get the studded ones. Felt soles are banned in Maryland, so don't buy those. They also help you from bashing your toes and give you good ankle support. I was at Black Hills today and fished out of the back of my buddy's boat. Finesse plastic worms and creature baits caught all of our fish, Texas rigged, drop shot, and Carolina rigs all worked. Fish were deep as you'd expect this time of year. We worked hard for them, fishing until noon. I finished with nine bass nothing big but some nice chunky ones, and my buddy's biggest was about three pounds. I think he caught about the same number. Quote
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