Benji, Lisa, John, Chip and John

Sunny and Pleasant, Water Temperature 70* and Clear.
Chip Wells of American Heating and Cooling gave his employees and a couple friends a day on the lake, I took out these 5 happy anglers and John took out 4 others. We got on the lake before dawn, caught bait and went fishing. Chip has been fishing the lake for Stripers and was primarily interested in learning "how to" fish for Stripers so that he and his friends could enjoy some of the catches that he has been viewing on my journal in the past. After catching bait we ran over some 28 foot flats that were loaded with clouds of bait and scattered Stripers suspended a couple feet off the bottom. We turned the boat around and put out downlines and boards rigged with some beautiful baits and pulled a mile stretch without getting a strike. I had been talking to Chadduck who was fishing further uplake and they were also seeing plenty of fish but were not taking hits either. The cold front that went through last night had pulled the bait off the banks and were positioned over and nearby the channels. We made a move and set up over an area where we could pull flats and humps ranging from 35 feet up to 5 feet deep. I set out 8 planner boards, a bobber, freeline and 6 downlines covering the whole water column searching to see what the fish wanted to bite. The first strike came on a board, Lisa reeled it in but it was a catfish. Our second strike came on a bobber over 13 feet of water, Benji jumped on the rod and wrestled the Striper to the boat. We worked the flat with no other hits so we continued to pull different water until we hit a 20 to 26 foot flat where we started taking hits on downlines. When I hit that flat we were all shocked when one of our downlines got hit so hard that if the line hadn't broke it would have broke the rod. Next thing we knew the downlines started going off and and we started putting fish in the boat. We fished the area for a couple hours until we ran out of bait, all our hits coming on downlines. Obviously the front had pulled the Stripers to the depths and they would not bite unless the baits were right in their faces.
The lake is about 20 inches low and fishing was poor in September. I postponed and rescheduled all my September trips due to the poor fishing and was happy to see that the cooler weather and shorter days have encouraged the Stripers to fatten up for the winter months ahead.