Lee, Joe, Thomas and Wil

January 18th, 2010: Sunny and Pleasant, Water Temperature 48* and Clear.
Caught bait early this morning , met my crew and was on the water 15 minutes before daylight anticipating a great day. Once it was light enough to see to put bait on the hooks I started a spread of 12 planner boards and a bobber. We pulled a shallow flat first expecting the fish to be up on it feeding with the warmer weather but the cold rain yesterday coupled with the barometer spike must have influenced the Stripers because instead of the fish being shallow and feeding it was hard to locate Stripers in any part of the water coulmn. We fished shallow and gradually worked to deeper flats and humps with limited success. After hitting numerous areas I made a major move and converted to working downlines hoping the deeper fish had not been affected as much as the shallow Stripers . With little success deep we continued to work other areas picking up a couple fish here and there. We took a lot of hits today but the fish were simply hitting the back of the bait, not wanting to eat it but just to kill it. We stuck with it fishing simular patterns where we would take strikes and by the end of the day we had caught 17 Stripers, mostly smaller fish and also a few punks. As luck would have it I emptied my bait tank and proceeded to pull one last ridge when Lee reached into his cooler and pulled out a banana to eat. All his friends exploded on him chastising him for bringing them on a boat, all of them knowing that especially in blue water the captains forbid bananas on board. Lee immediately tried to justify his actions and said that we had a good day and opened the livewell showing the guys how many we had caught with the bananas on board. Joe reached in the cooler , picked up the remaining banana and threw it as far as he could into the lake. We pulled up on the ridge with 13 baits in the water, no bait in the tank, and everything we had got hit. We boated a few and lost a few, even tried throwing artificial baits but the fish would not hit them. I do not believe in superstition but this is the second time on my boat we were having only fair success but after realizing and eliminating bananas on board the fishing changed drastically. Needless to say Lee won't be taking bananas fishing any more.