Started the day late, so got there around 2PM. I was planning to fish at the parking lot closest to the dam, but I saw my buddy way down stream at his car. He told me it was packed by the dam and he did ok at his location.
We back down to the river and started fishing. Got a shad on the first cast. Got eight shad on the stringer and I brought them up the car to bring beer back down.

Had another four shad on the stringer and had a drink or two. My buddy decides he is done. I stayed for another couple hours and caught seven more. During the last three hours I was there, seemed like I miss more bites and had a lot of shad spit the hook. If you ever been shad fishing, you know the makes go bananas when your fighting them. The shad are like kokanee at the boat except your fighting the current too which makes it fun and challenging. I was using an 8'6" steelhead rod that was fast action. Would of probably landed more with a softer and forgiving rod. They were all caught on shad darts with certain colors working better at certain times. Overall, I had a lot of fun.

Some side notes:
a) Keeping a stringer was a bad idea. It only drew attention to myself and people were trying to crowd me in out of my spot. At one point I was tying a new set up and a dude steals my spot in front my stringer. I let him know that it wasn't cool and he snagged in the rocks. Its not the spot, its the technique. Amount of lead used, jig size and color all makes a difference.

b) Saw a plunker hook into probably a salmon and he was horsing it in. Sturgeon fishing is closed there right now. He got the fish near shore. I saw big splashes and his line went loose. It was the only springer action I saw there.

tluedeke

6/9/2013 10:18:00 PM

Man, I wish I'd seen your report earlier. See my great fishing/disastrous co-fishermen report for today (6/9).

At least you had the schadenfreude of watching the guy snag up in your spot. I lost a rig on the bottom today mid-morning, and while I was sitting there obviously retying my rig back up, a guy just jumped in front of me and sat there for two hours. I was too polite and just glared daggers at him and made excessively loud comments to my friend about "assholes and etiquette" (to no avail). Finally he quit catching anything, and moved off to jump in front of somebody else downstream.

I'm not an antagonistic dude, and I usually wish that folks would come to their own realization on how their actions adversely affect others, but I was about ready to trip this jerk into the river ("Here! Catch this flotation device (ahem, 50 lb rock)- and let me know how far above the bottom the shad are when you finally drag yourself out of the river!")...

tluedeke

6/9/2013 10:19:00 PM

All that said, but damn are shad fun or what? Glad to hear you cleaned up on them, despite the non-Labrador retriever like behavior of your co-fishermen....

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