Fishing is getting better

Jason Mills

Sunny and Beautiful, Water temperature 65* and Clear

Today Jason had some friends out [who bailed out for the pic] for a morning of Striper fishing. It was a fun morning with sporadic action but we managed to catch some nice eating fish. We worked a combination of planner boards and downlines today but caught most of the fish nearby the channel. Yesterday and today the fish were not positioned where they should be for this time of year. Once the lake turns over they will become much more predictable. Need to be versatile this time of year to keep the rods bending. 

A beautiful morning on the lake

Whitney, Isaac and Clark

Sunny and Pleasant, Water temperature 65* and Clear

This morning we caught bait and fished many different patterns but all we could do is catch a fish here and there. We would catch a fish on a ledge, then out near the channel, one on a point then one up on a shallower flat but never could we pattern the fish. We kept baits in the water and I never made a big move because I had no pattern to fish??? Anyway it worked out well and caught some nice Stripers.

A early morning bite

 Rick and Rick and his crew

 This is a screen shot I took today as we had numerous hookups. In the center of the screen is a ball of bait and to the right of the bait are Stripers going Nuts! I should have waited to take the pic but I was too busy netting fish when the good stuff was on the screen.

This shot is typical of feeding Stripers. In the top half of the pic is bait fleeing from the Stripers. The Stripers are obvious just below the bait. The fish with the most color are in the cone of the transducer and you can see fainter arches and streaking without dark color which are on the outside of the cone. I was only in 20 feet of water here and the width of the cone where the fish are is not very wide. In the picture above this one the boat was only in 15 feet of water and all of the arches were directly under the transducer. There is a whole lot going on in these two screen shots. Love my Navionics!

Screen Shots

I got bored with all the bad weather lately so I put this together for you all to enjoy. Click on the picture for explanation of shot.

Catching Bait

 A nice catch of Gizzards

This is a whole lot of Giz, many thousands of them, over an acre of beautiful baits. They were certainly catchable with the right net. Side scan discriminates better and shows each individual bait and its size better than the sonar does. You could also change your page to  use side and down scan to see more clearly.

"This is Kevin. I was catching bait during the day this weekend and it wasn’t easy. I used popcorn to mark the spot and it worked after about four tries on Saturday. I had 95 blue back herring and I was on top of the world!
                But it was a lot tougher on Sunday. I thought, if the bait was in the center of the screen, they would be directly under the transducer. Is that true? If not where are they in relation to the screen? I looked at your last post and it seems to indicate that they are more at the front of the screen going left to right.
                After about twenty tries; I had 75 baits, but I didn’t know why it was so hard. I went up stream to see if I could find bigger bait balls. “I should have went fishing, but I wanted to learn about catching bait in the day.” At one point my whole screen was yellow. How could I not catch bait: I wondered? I was on med chrip about 85 color line and maybe 55 sensitivity. I know I need to pay more attention when I am catching at night, but I do remember seeing patches of red when using the lights to catch bait at night. It gets confusing because I am experimenting with my new sonar and chirp. Should I not be looking for yellow when looking for bait?
                I appreciate any help you can give me.
Signed frustrated bait catcher."

" Hey Jim, can you post photos of the baits? I.E. gizzards large and small, blue-back, threadfin, alewife, etc. Would be a great add to your sonar shots. Joy . "

These are two emails I received from from my clients, journal followers turned friends this week. I can interpret what I see on a Lowrance or Simrad due to the many thousands of hours I have spent on the water using my electronics to locate and catch bait and fish. I know what almost every mark is on a screen due to the fact that over time when I see bait I throw a cast net and catch the bait and recognize the sonar signature that is on the screen. The same with fish arches. I will put baits in the fishes faces and catch the fish then store the screen shot in my memory. I will then relate my experience to future views on the screen to determine what bait I am looking at or what kind of fish are below the boat. I refine my thoughts to is the bait worth throwing on [correct type and is it actually catchable]  or are the fish I am seeing the kind of fish I want to catch , the size I want to catch and are they feeding and worth the time to stop and put baits out on them.

The bait in this lake school. You can look for miles sometimes wondering if your depth finder is working then trip over schools [usually clouds] of bait. Once I find the bait I determine what kind of bait they are [by the configuration of the cloud and size of tiny specks or arches on the sonar screen or the size of the vertical dashes on side scan]. I will only throw if I think the bait is dense enough to catch in my net at whatever depth they are at. I determine that by the density of the bait school. the more color in the school the more the bait is congregated and obviously more catchable.

Regarding setting upon catchable fish, I look for numerous arches again with plenty of color in the arch along with the size of the arch. Once I find them I look for how they are relating to the bottom or what part of the water column they are in. Then I want to see them moving, not just suspending. Feeding fish will have streaking arches on the screen depicting them swimming trying to catch bait. You usually will see streaking on your screen. Non feeding fish usually are bunches of perfectly drawn arches under the boat simply hanging out. I also want to see tall vertical dashes on my side scan with shadows behind them. The larger the dash and bigger the shadow the bigger the fish.
I will visit locating and catching Stripers in another posting. I want to answer some questions here on catching bait.

Kevin is a dedicated Striper fisherman that has no problem catching bait under lights at night but needs to catch daytime bait as well. When bait is plentiful just about anyone can do it, but those times are few on this lake. Catching daytime Herring requires an understanding of where the bait is in relation to the boat and perfect timing to throw the net exactly on top of the bait. I locate bait by running about 20 mph until I see it then note where it was either by a marking it with a waypoint, visualizing it or throwing a peanut or in Kevin's case popcorn. I throw my net off of the front of my boat so I put my trolling motor in the water which has two transducers on it, a sonar and structure scan. I use the big motor to go back to the bait and I usually locate it on side scan before sonar. The combination of sonar and side scan is deadly on catching bait. You can determine exactly where the bait is.

Back to the questions: The sonar screen scrolls from right to left. What is happening right now [directly underneath the transducer] is on the extreme right side of the screen. As the screen moves to the left it become history. Depending on the direction you are traveling and your speed what shows up in the middle of the screen could be 20 to 30 yards behind you. You can determine exactly how far back it is by touching the school on your screen and looking at a box that appears showing you how far it is from your current location. You could also waypoint it if you wish. The settings on your unit help with density of the school. Depending on the palette you are on, more or brighter color represents density. Kevin your color may be set a little too high. Also depending on your depth your sensitivity may have also been to high and displayed a more aggressive screen. Maybe try auto sensitivity and color line for awhile. It is great that you are experimenting but use your side scan as well to see what side of the boat the majority of bait is and exactly how far it is. Use an educated decision in throwing the net over top of them and your results may be better. Don't get frustrated in not catching daytime bait with regularity, sometimes it takes me hours to locate and catch it. If the water is clear the the bait is deep, it is tough!
Hopefully you understand your screen a little better and can time your throws using the combination of sonar, side scan and your popcorn. If you wait long enough you may be able to catch a gull diving down on your popcorn.....

I will be happy to help anglers with questions about Navico products. Screen shots and settings help me determine what you are asking about. Don't worry about me posting them, I am using this post just to let you know I am out here and maybe can help. My email is jim_hemby@hotmail.com, or you can comment me on my journal or facebook me.

Hopefully this help some of you frustrated bait fisherman

Simrad Screen Shots

 These are a few scattered Stripers on a 25 foot flat with some catfish mixed in. Many of my clients want to understand how I know how large a fish is by looking at my unit. Sonar works kind of like a small pen-like flashlight. If you were to shine the light straight down the cone angle is very tight near the light [or transducer] then spreads outward the deeper it gets. The closer the object is to the center of the cone, the better the reflection will be. The fish at 8 feet on the left of the screen is directly in the center of the cone. It shows almost a perfect arch and has some color in the core of the fish. The fish at 12 feet just to the right of the first fish is off slightly to the side of the center of the cone. It is more flat in nature and barely has any color in it. Then the yellow flat signature to the right of it is on the outer edge of the cone angle, displaying no color. The size of the fish are relative to how far the fish is from the transducer. The fish at 8 feet appears to be nice but it is only 8 feet from the transducer. The closer it is to the transducer the bigger it appears. It may have been a 1 pound fish. Now if that same fish was in 24 feet, the arch would have been about a third of that size. Consequently in determining how large a fish is you must take into consideration how far it is from the transducer. The Stripers on the screen were probably 2 to 4 pound fish.

 This is a brushpile with crappie holding on top of the brush and next to the brush. You can see tiny arches on the left side of the brush, on top of it and a suspending school just to the right of the brush. You can tell that it is brush because it is connect to the bottom. If it were bait for example the fine yellowish line that is the surface of the bottom would come underneath the object just like it does underneath or the two catfish laying near the bottom.

I took this shot while looking for Stripers. There was about 3 to 4 acres of bait that I was searching to see if there were any Stripers that might be feeding. I looked for about 10 minutes but all I could find was bait. The small vertical arches that are stacked vertically are white perch. The school of bait on the left side of the screen is 4 to 5 inch Gizzards and the small school near the middle of the screen is Threadfin shad. Threadfins always look kind of like a rocket ship, they have a point on the top of the school, very dense center then have two downward "tails" underneath the school. The way I know what they are is that I have been throwing cast nets on bait for the last 25 years and I recognize the correlation of what I catch in the net to the shape and size of  what I see on my depth finder. When I target specific types of bait I throw only on what I know to be what I want. That 10 foot 1 1/2 pound net gets heavy after 20 to 30 throws!

A Relaxfull Fall Morning

Doug, Jan, Joyce and Doug

Sunny and Pleasant, Water Temperature 77* and Clear

Today's charter was a fun morning spent with two couples from Pennsylvania. We started the morning off by pulling boards and running downlines checking out flats and points from 5 to 25 feet deep. Today's fish were caught in "places". We never located any schooling fish today. We had just enough action to keep everyone happy and plenty of fillets to take home for the table. Looks like the wind is going to blow out of the Northeast for the next week or so with plenty of rain on its way.

Dialing in a new outboard

Greg and Carlos

Today I wanted to take my boat out and set up my new motor so I called Greg and he said he could get off around lunch time. He came over and we hit the lake around noon and we took the boat for a ride. I had water in my bait tanks so I could prop the boat out properly and we decided to catch some bait and fish for a hour or so. I did not see any bait main lake so we ran into the back of a creek and caught about 120 baits. We hit one place and popped two in ten minutes but we released them. We made a short move and set up on a 100 yard stretch. Five minutes after getting our baits in the water we had a deck full of Stripers. We rebaited our lines, counted the fish and needed 2 more for a limit. Before we knew it Greg had boated 2 more Stripers and we were done.  He threw those fish in the box and before we could get our other 8 lines up we hooked up numerous times and released those fish. Not bad for an hour of fishing! I have been off the water for about 2 weeks now with the exception of breaking my motor in a couple hours last week. The reason Greg is smiling so much is that the big fish he caught is 34 inches long. Carlos is in the picture because he just wanted to see what it was like to hold up a stringer of fish....I should have made him hold them up for 10 to 15 seconds like he sometimes does my clients but I couldn't do that to him.

Tony's clients recent catches

Simrad Screen Shots

 In this screen shot I had caught bait and was running back to the marina to pick up my clients. I noticed a bunch of fish stacked up on a contact point adjacent to a feeding flat. This is a classic example of how Largemouth Bass and Stripers work in the summer months. They both use contact points [areas of a large flat that have a lot of definition nearby a channel] to congregate prior to moving up onto the flat where they spread out and feed then they use the same contact point to get back together after feeding to group back up and move off the flat to suspend till another feeding session. I did not have to pick my clients up till 6am so I waypointed the spot and went back to it. I dropped two herring down to 18 feet and hooked up with two 3 to 4 pound Largemouth. When I was a Basshole I would check 20 to 30 contact points a day trying to catch the bass congregating and when I did 5 casts later I would have a limit. I would use a weighted DB3 that I drilled under the bill and filled with lead to get the bait to run deeper. When the Bass would pull off the point to deeper water they would suspend in the same depth. Sometimes I could pull off the point as well and catch the suspending bass once I relocated them. Anyway I was hoping these fish might have been Stripers to put my clients on first thing that morning but that wasn't the case.

 This was the first school of Stripers I located in the morning. This was the tail end of the school where most of the punks were. There were hundreds if not thousands of fish in the school but I could not find the front of the school where the more aggressive Stripers would have been.

 This is just another shot of the school while I was looking for larger fish.

 Here I had located another school of Stripers and was using my side scan to look for the larger fish. We were catching fish here but mostly punks. The fish were not active at this point. I continued to look for more aggressive and larger Stripers until I found what you see in the pic below.

I found the lead pack of the school which were noticeably larger fish. If you look to the left of the side scan screen you can see the larger vertical dashes compared to the smaller ones on the right of the screen. It doesn't take a genius to steer the boat to the left to get on the nicer fish. We caught  four or five nicer Stripers there but the fish were still not active [no streaking and very compressed in the sonar page] and by then 5 or 6 boats had seen us catching fish and has moved in on us with their big motors spooking the school even more. I left these fish to find other schools with no boat traffic in hopes of catching non pressured schools. Stripers do not like fishing pressure and especially do not like Barometric Pressure changes. A cold front had moved in lowering the water temp a degree or two but the Barometric Pressure climbed significantly enough to shut them down. When you see so many fish like there are in these screen shots and you put your baits in their faces only to catch punks and Catfish it is time to move on.  When nicer Stripers are feeding they will not allow a punk or Kitty to eat. The move paid off for us and we caught a 10 pound Striper and numerous other keepers.

Good Electronics are the key to success on lakes in the summer months. Understanding how to set them up and how to interpret what you are seeing are the keys to utilizing their potential to the fullest. Simrad and Lowrance are the best money can buy. They make the difference in fishing or catching!

Thousands of Stripers not wanting to eat.

 Mark, Carmine and Reed

Carmine with a nice Striper

Sunny and warm, Water Temperature 85* and clear

I filled the tanks up with 230 baits this morning, picked my clients up at 6 at High Point and took off in search of Stripers. I checked a couple of areas but boat traffic kept running through where I wanted to fish so I made a move back downlake. I found a school off of a mainlake point so I stopped and we set up on them. Just after stopping fish started breaking nearby us and we started hooking up. I saw hundreds of fish but the bite was not in line with the amount of fish I was seeing. It was quite cool this morning and I believe the front had contributed to the lack of hook ups. After loosing this school I looked around and found remnants of them and worked them for a few minutes. Fish were everywhere but pretty well scattered, not schooled tightly. A friend Dale was trolling across the lake from me where I had found thousands of Stripers two days ago and I noticed he turned around in that area so I called him on the radio and asked if he saw any fish over there. He had run over them and had turned around to hit them again. He had 3 hook ups and hung the other rig up. He called Tony and myself over to fish it with bait because there was too much irregular structure for him to work. We went over and the mother-load of Stripers were there. We set up on them but again for seeing thousands of fish on the depth finder we were only catching a few here and there, and mostly punks. After 45 minutes of working them and catching maybe 20 fish it got way too crowded with boats so I moved on. We hit a couple of other areas catching fish everywhere we went. Reed was hot this morning catching well over half of the fish while Carmine sat patiently up front. He got the last laugh by catching the biggest Striper of the day.  Although we found thousands of fish today the Stripers really did not cooperate and we only caught about 35. The guys had a great time with that but I know what it could have been if the fish wanted to eat this morning.

SIMRAD Screen Shots

 This is a shot I popped yesterday morning while in a school of Stripers. We had been banging them for 45 minutes and this was the first chance to take a pic of what we were working. Lately I have been using my Navionics map to keep me on contours that the Stripers are holding on. I have shaded the map with blue being 0 to 20 feet and also 40 feet and above. This allows me to keep in the 21 to 40 foot range where we have been catching the fish lately. In the mornings the fish have been very close to the transition from around 20 feet then as it gets brighter they have tended to move deeper.

I took this shot looking for Stripers. I had been cruising about 20 mph on the left side of my echo screen and saw a bunch of Stripers then slowed down to investigate. The Striprs at speed show up as dark colored "blobs" but as I slow down they turn into arches with color in the middle. I keep my colorline where all the keeper fish show some dark redish brown in them and the punks simply show yellow. This allows me to keep my sensitivity up while running but enables me to distinguish keeper fish. Also in this screen shot while chirping you can clearly see a Striper right in the middle of a school of herring. When I noticed that I immediately cut the big motor off, touched the screen over the school of bait, deployed the trolling motor, went directly to the waypoint and spanked the Stripers. Notice how clear the screenshot is on this Simrad. How sweet it is to have technology like this and know how to take advantage of it.

This is the time of year Anthony and myself [Navico Pro Staff] sell our units to make room for our new ones. We have sold two of our Lowrance's and have a month to sell one more Lowrance and two NSS EVO 2 12 inch touch units. These are units I take my pics on and use daily. They are under warranty and guaranteed to put you on fish. They also come with a introductory demo to educate you on how to use them. They are so user friendly it doesn't take but a few minutes to feel comfortable with them. I can be reached at Jim_Hemby@hotmail.com . Check out all the Simrad products at Greentop Sporting Goods.

Boys Day Out

Benjamin, Ralph and Alec

Sunny and Pleasant, Water Temperature 85* and Clear.

This is my kind of charter, two boys eager to catch fish and their Dad eager to see them catch fish. Right at first light I set them up on a school of Stripers. We no sooner put the baits in the water before the rods started bending over. An hour later we had boated 20 fish a were ready for a break. We hit a couple more ares with limited success then I set up over a 18 foot structure and hooked into a couple of big uns. Benny caught the first big fish and thought he was the cats meow until Alec hooked up and when his fish rolled about 30 yards from the boat everyone gasped. The boys did great today catching about 40 to 50 fish. Not a bad way to spend the morning on the water watching boys catching fish.

Yes Roy CAN Catch fish

Margus, Irina, Ann and Roy

Sunny and Pleasant, water temperature 83* and Clear

A couple of weeks ago I took out a group of guys and Tony took out the rest. As we were departing from the dock the guys on my boat pitied the other boat because Roy was on it and he had a reputation of not being able to catch fish. Well we fished all morning and came back t the dock that day and we had a nice stringer of fish but Tony's boat had 0. After taking pictures that day Roy said his father in law was coming from overseas and loves to fish, would I take them out , even with the monkey on Roy's back. I said Bulls__t, lets go and we will catch plenty of fish. Well if anyone sees a monkey swimming around the lake, it is finally off of Roy's back. We had a lot of fun this morning catching Stripers and Margus will have good memories of fishing in America. Here is a picture of some happy Fishermen.

Navico Screen Shots

 This is a screen shot that I popped yesterday morning when we were all over our first school of Stripers. As you can see we had Stripers from 15 to 28 feet deep here. Whenever you see this you should have all your rods hooked up.

 I took this shot a little later in the morning. I lost the deeper schools of earlier on in the day so I decided to look shallower and look what we found....Stripers.

 This shot came from a Lowrance HDS12. It was taken at the same time as the top Simrad screen shot was. In both shots you can clearly see how many Stripers are congregated below the boat. Notice the smaller fish hugging the bottom under the Stripers on the left half of the sonar screen. These are Catfish gobbling up the scraps the Stripers create when they attack a school of bait. Catfish hang below and behind schools of Stripers. Once you start catching Cats, either raise your baits up or get back into the nucleus of the Striper school. The top part of this screen shows side scan doing its job. Each vertical dash is a Striper. I kept the boat positioned right in the middle of the school. Notice I have hundreds of Stripers on both sides of the boat. Without Side scan I could have lost the school within minutes. Are you fishing without this technology? If you are you probably are simply fishing, not catching. Want to get hooked up with a Simrad or a Lowrance at a good price? It's the time of year for Anthony and myself to replace our Pro Staff units. Email me at Jim_Hemby@hotmail.com if you are interested. 

VDGIF Biologists

Hunter, Jarrett, John, Dominic, and Mike

Cloudy and Warm, Water Temperature 85* and Clear

Today was a fun day for me, every year I take out the Va. Game and Inland Fisheries biologists for a morning of fishing. They get to reap some of the rewards of their labor by catching the fish that they manage and stock. I enjoy getting into their heads about the overall condition of the lake but more importantly the Striper population and their plans for stocking Stripers in the future at Lake Anna. Recently they have stocked Hybrid Stripers which have grown to 12 to 15 inches already and also introduced Saugeye [a cross between Saugers and Walleye] which has grown over 20 inches to date. This morning we started off well by boating about a dozen Stripers in the first 30 minutes of fishing. Wish the rest of the morning could have went as well but the schools dissipated fairly rapidly and we had to work for every fish thereafter. The water temperature has gone up a few degrees in the last week which has schooled the Stripers up much better than in the previous weeks. This morning we caught about 30 Stripers and a dozen Catfish. Someone at the marina told me I probably should have taken them to a barren area so they would want to stock more Stripers next year but these guys do a great job of keeping a great Striper fishery in a lake that is difficult to manage due to some unfavorable conditions the lake has. Last year I took them out and had our best day ever on the lake for catching Stripers. We boated 270 Stripers by 1 o'clock that day. We kept our limits and released all the rest of the fish to fight again another day. Now there is a testament to a job well done.

Classic Furniture of Charlottesville

 Abby, Leyton, Gwyneth, Zeke, Brooks, Robert and Carson

Abby with a nice Bass

Sunny and Hot, Water temperature 86* and clear

This morning I got out early and caught bait then picked my clients up at 6am at High Point Marina. I was looking forward to today's trip because I was taking out a client [Robert] who I have been trying to help crack this code for Striper fishing on the lake. He went out with me last year and has bought all the gear to catch Stripers and still needs some "fine tuning". It was also fun to get back out with his son's family again. We started by reviewing what I was seeing on my Simrad then we set up where I saw a couple fish and showed them how to deploy the baits and how to reel in the fish. We were all good so we went looking for Stripers. I found the remnants of a school so we set up on them and popped a few Stripers then caught about 6 or 8 Catfish. After hooking up with the catfish I knew the Stripers had moved on and so did we. As I was taking off Abby saw some Stripers spraying on the other side of the flat I was working so we headed that direction. I stopped about 150 yards before the school so I would not spook them. We put the baits out as I was closing the gap towards the school. Next thing I knew all of our rods starting bending over and the game was on. Abby was hooked up in the rear of the boat with her drag screaming so I netted 3 or 4 other Stripers while she battled her fish. Once I netted her fish we had to scramble to get the fish off of the hooks and rebait our rods. As we put them down they would hook up and the kids would reel them in. Couldn't get any better than this, kids on board and rods buried in the water. Zeek and Robert were trying to keep up with taking the fish off of the hooks while I baited hooks and netted fish. The two screenshots below I popped in the middle of all of the action. Notice how many fish were on my side scan page. Also notice how I was using my Navionics card with highlighted depth ranges. I was staying right on the break where the blue and white shades meet. The waypoints are where we were intersecting the school. Is that cool or what? Back to fishing. We lost the school temporarily but I located it two more times and we spanked the Stripers. Sweet thing was the kids were doing great and Loving it! As all good things go it finally petered out and we had to go catch bait. We caught about 125 more and set up in a couple different areas. The last area we hit we had some hogs hooked up but could not get them in. Depressing but overshadowed by all the fun we had this morning. Ended up being a great day that we all will remember for a long time. Hope Robert can remember some of the tricks I showed him today so he can take his wife back out and put her on some nice Stripers.

And Yes, there are still Stripers in Lake Anna!

A few nice Stripers

 Scott, Chris and AJ

 Justin

 

Jason, Bryan, Mike and Justin

 

Si, Lauren, Andy and Chris

These are a few nice fish Tony's clients caught this week.

A fun morning with the kids

Michael and Anthony

Sunny and Pleasant, Water Temperature 83* and Clear

Today the boys wanted to go tubing so DP and I took the boys out for a couple hours this morning.

We got on the water about 6, drove around for about 20 minutes looking for bait, saw a school, threw the net and caught 200 in one cast. We looked for about 15 minutes for Stripers but everywhere I went there were boats so I decided to go somewhere where it was peaceful. We caught fish for two two hours straight then took the boys tubing for an hour before getting off the water around 10. The boys are holding up a couple they caught together.

A fun Saturday morning on the lake

John, Ally, John and Jeff

Sunny and Pleasant, Water Temperature 85* and Clear

Tony and I caught bait early and picked our clients up at 6 at High Point. I set up over 35 foot flats early and we started catching fish within the first 5 minutes of the morning. We were not on schools but were targeting small pods of Stripers. We caught fish at a rate of about 1 every 5 minutes or so. Before we knew it we were getting low on bait so we went and caught 150 more and headed down lake away from the boat traffic. We looked for quite awhile until I decided to set up in an area that was opposite of what we had been doing. We had looked for fish and not seen large schools so I told the guys lets do something Bass Ackwards. We set our baits out and immediately John hooked up with a hog. The rod was doubled over and everyone was yelling at him to get it out of the holder. after 8 to 10 seconds he still did not have the rod out and the fish was pulling drag and had gone under the boat and was heading uplake. As things happened, John never got the rod out and the fish broke the line off on the bottom of the boat. We continued to work the area and popped a few nice fish there. Fishing was not great today but we all had a lot of fun together. I lost count of how many fish we caught but I think it was around 30. If only John could have got that rod out of the holder!!!!!

Rhett Wade and Sons

Cloudy and rainy, Water Temperature 85* and clear

I have been on vacation for a few days so today was my first day back in a while. Woke up to rain but had to go out and catch bait. Picked the guys up at 6 and headed out. Saw some nice schools of bait so I threw and topped my tanks off so I would not have to later. Today I never saw any decent schools, just fish scattered everywhere. We sat up in a few areas where the fish were the densest and caught about 25 Stripers this morning, only eight being keepers. I guess that was not bad for a rainy, cold front kind of day. When I got back home around noon it was only 66* and still raining. Tomorrow is another day.

Some of Tony's recents clients catches

 Eric and Cody

 Ashley and Lucus

 Mike and Carrol

 Jay

Greentop Sporting Goods Sale August 6th thru 16th

Greentop is having a great sale coming up soon that you should not miss. In addition to great pricing on many items on Saturday, August 15th Mark Sullivan from Navico will be at Greentop giving seminars about Lowrance and Simrad products. In addition to Mark Pro Staffers Anthony Hicks and myself Jim Hemby will be there to assist you in getting the most out of your Depth Finders. We can help you fine tune you Lowrance or Simrad to the body of water you fish and answer any "How do I" questions you may have. I will also have my screenshots that you see on my journal and facebook pages there. We will be able to help you with setting up your pages to look like mine and discuss in detail what you are looking at on the screen shots. Take advantage of this special Greentop event to learn about the Best Depth Finders on the market. For more information about the event go to www.greentophuntfish.com or call 804 550 2188 and press options 5 then 2 for the electronics department.