I am looking for a recent report for Scofield. Curious where people are fishing, what rig to use, how deep the fish are and how many feet of water they are in. I'm headed out Friday so if someone is going up between now and then I would appreciate the help. Thanks
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Fished the just outside the dam arm on the north end. We were fishing in 17 FOW and were catching chubs between 12-14 FOW. We caught 2 cutts at about that same depth. I caught them on a green ratfinee, an orange and white VMC wax tail, a green VMC wax tail, a white paddle bug, a lime green tear drop (I don't know the name). We caught 12 chubs last Saturday.
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Was at Scofield today with my son. We started out in the bay where the boy scout camp is and caught nothing but chubs in about 2hrs. of fishing. Jumped on the snow machines and headed west over to the next cove. There we caught about 15 of the famous Scofield snake cutthroats. Glow in the dark paddle bugs tipped with worm in about 6ft. of water is what we were using. This lake is in really bad shape. Its almost like the cutthroats have nothing to eat they are so skinny.
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Sounds like it will be a chub fest. Thanks for the info. Anybody else try by the dam?
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Fished South end about by island today. 8' of water.
One 20" cut. One chub. Multiple very small cuts. 7"-8" long.
Very light bite.
White tipped with worm best.
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We've been up at the entrance to the dam arm two of the last three weekends. We've caught about 110 fish combined in those trips and only 10 or 12 have been trout - a bunch of
looking cutts and two tigers that were about 10" long.
We were using little ice jigs/flies, tiny spoons, ratfinkees, ratsos, really anything small and tipped with either a meal worm or night crawler - the night crawlers were the most productive. It is definitely a chub fest, but they are fun to catch and make great bait for the other lakes that have now frozen over.
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I went yesterday just outside the dam arm. Fished for a few hours in 15 ft of water. Caught 36 chubs and 3 skinny trout. Fished with ratfinkies, green tube jigs, kastmasters tipped with worms, meal worms and minnows. I'm not gonna go back this year.
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I was up there yesterday on the very southwest bay just south of the island. Most of that area is only 3-4 ft deep but there are a lot of cutts cruising the area. The great thing about fishing that side is there are very few chubs. We caught over 20 cutts,one rainbow and one chub. We did pull in 4 nice healthy 18 inch Cutts and lost a couple more. About half the fish were the newly planted 8-10 inch fish and there were a lot of 12-14 inch skinny fish. The thing that surprised me most of all was that we did not catch a single tiger.
When we got home and I was preparing the fish tacos, I filleted out the 12 in chub and trimmed off the dark oily section and fried it up. It tasted great but a little bony. I think the smaller the better for fried chub.
Looking at the DNR Fish Stocking Report, nearly 135,000 tiger trout at 6 inches were put in in 2015. Another 35,000 2 inch Tigers were planted. Where are all these fish? What is eating them? Is there some kind of shark roaming around that does not like the taste of chubs? I think there are a couple hundred 10lb plus tiger trout just eating trout. I would like to know from the gill net study if they are full of trout or chubs.
The 130,000 tigers planted in 2014 were 6.92 inches. It just does not make since! Do they need to wait until they are 10-12 inches before releasing them? Then there are the nearly 350,000 8 inch cutts stocked each year but not very slot Cutts to be found. I understand that the chubs are taking over and competing, but the numbers just don't make since. I think the few large Tigers and Cutts prefer the small trout over the chubs.
There just aren't enough large fish around to make a dent on these chubs. It might be time for some Wipers!
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Looking at this photo all the chubs are adults. Whereas in years past people were catching many small chubs and many large chubs the size variation was very big.
To me this means that the stocking program is working to a degree because the small baby chubs are all being eaten. The problem we now have is that the big chubs will spawn every year providing a forage base for large trout, but the big chubs will continue to eat out the food source for most smaller and intermediate sized trout. AND unfortunately the chub life cycle is a long one. Those adult chubs could be around for another 10-12 years. Its time to catch all we can and make some bait!
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Except they'll live for 20 to 30 years. So what you see is what you've got until 2035 or later.
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Ah yes, that is the life span I was thinking. Mistakenly said 10 years.
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