strugglin…..

….continues to be the theme at Elwood, at least for me. Went out with a buddy yesterday and he’s had some good days lately, but it’s been real up and down. We had a real hard time finding much bait at all in that lake. This has been common for quite some time, and we feel there is a real problem at this lake with there not being enough groceries for the fish. It’ll be interesting to see what NGPC does in the immediate future concerning this lake.

We looked deep, fished shallow, and had a tough day. Think we had 3 or 4 whites, one walleye, one pike, and numerous lost fish. No real quality fish this time around.

Looks like the weather is really going to turn around for the worst in the next week. Time to start thinking about winterizing, as much as I hate to.

Whats the water temp down there? Atleast ya got a few fish.

Water temp was 55-57. Some bays were warmer than others, of course, but the main lake was about 55ish.

Brian,

What is strange about your not finding baitfish, is that if there is a lack of prey, then the predator fish you are fishing for should be easy to catch–hungry predators result in a hot bite.

The fish you did catch, how did they look?

Daryl Bauer
Fisheries Outreach Program Manager
Nebraska Game & Parks Commission
[email protected]
Bauer’s Barbs and Backlashes

As far as white bass go, they looked fine as they always have. The pike seemed a little bigger than the springtime fish, but I have heard of fewer being caught in recent months.

As for the walleyes…you can be the judge. This was the real killer from the day, so of course I had to take a pic. He really thumped the B Fish-n-Tackle paddletail too. Anyone can catch fish, but it takes a helluva fisherman to catch a fish like this, right??

Another reason I took the above pic is because of what Daryl has always said about predators eating something half to 2/3 their size. This was a good example of that. This bait was 4 1/2″ long.

There’s still quite a bit of cover left in the lake for the bait to hide in, and with what we saw on the graph, you have to assume that’s where the bulk of it was. But the problem is, we fished a lot of those areas where we saw other fish or bait present, and it was very slow. If we didn’t see anything going on, we avoided it all together. A real struggle indeed.