The Martin Family

Sunny and Pleasant, Water temperature 85* and Clear.
Peter emailed me on Sunday expressing interest in taking his family fishing for a half a day this week while they were at the lake on vacation. He also had some concern as to what fishing would be like after reading my last journal entry. I explained to him that although fishing has slowed down from the 30 to 50 fish a morning that we were catching in June and July I felt we could catch some nice fish but it would be nice if the night before would be cloudy so the fish would not feed all night in the twilight of the bright full moon. Peter wanted to fish so we booked today and I told him I would go out on Monday to locate some fish. I did go out yesterday, Sunday night was cloudy and I hit 5 different areas catching fish in all the places that I checked. Unfortunately I picked his family up this morning and as luck would have it the moon had been bright all night. I had caught bait so we motored a short distance and set out a spread of boards and downlines. We hooked up on a downline immediately and put the first Striper in the boat. We had a couple more solid hits then the fish turned off. The fish started hitting just the back of the baits killing the baits so I decided to make a move. We set up on a small school of Stripers that were suspended off the bottom for about 100 yards but the fish did not want to eat, we continued to keep getting short hits with no hookups. I had spoken to two other friends that were fishing who were experiencing the same thing, seeing fish, putting baits on them and the fish simply killing the bait. By 10 o'clock I was almost out of bait but had a hunch that it had been 4 hours since the fish had feed, the moon was at the horizon which is a minor feed, and more times than not when the moon is bright at night the fish will feed mid day versus feeding early and late in the day. I had a friend out who was finished fishing call me that had 40 baits left so I got them from him and tried one more area that I knew some nice fish were in. We set up on the area and all of a sudden the 2 front downlines hooked up, then a board and another downline went down. We worked the area for about 30 minutes till we went through the 50 remaining baits I had. It was a great ending to a beautiful day on the water. Peter's family is pictured holding some of the fish we caught this morning.
Can't wait to loose this moon faze!