Beginner Steve's beginners luck

[BeginnerSteve]

'Ello everyone, Beginner Steve here, I'd like to start off by thanking the people who helped me in my last post, using your advice I was finally able to get those long fabled "fish archs" to appear on my finder (the trick was setting it to structure ID instead of inverse, and increasing the graph speed in case you were wondering what did the trick).

I proceeded to use this newfound wealth of technological advantage to graph... a whole lot of empty lake!

5 Hours were spent on lovely Spruce Run Reservoir in central New Jersey today, and while I was not completely skunked (caught 1 dinky smallmouth, 1 dinky largemouth and a decent pike pictured below, all within 10 minutes of each other) it sure felt like it. We were targeting the Hybrid Bass that they stock in Spruce Run and we have had some success before catching them, but today I did not even sniff a hybrid. We tried all the spots that we had caught them last summer and not a nibble. It seemed everywhere we went we saw nothing but blank screen on our finder (usually we at least get a lot of action on the screen with fishID on, today nada). The fish had to be somewhere, they don't just disappear off the face of the earth, but I'll be darned if we could find them.

I'm not sure if Hybrids behave differently in spring than during the dog days of summer but if anyone has been hybrid fishing and has some insight, I'd love to hear it.

Lastly, heres a photo of the pike I caught (beginner's luck, it was a completely unexpected strike). All 3 fish today were caught very shallow on a yamamoto lipless crank, gold colored.

[inline Pike.jpg]
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[Tarpon4me]

that's fishing man. Glad you got the sonar figured out. Keep playing with it. The more you learn to use it, the more productive you'll be.

Fish definately act different in the summer versus the fall, you need to study the species you are targeting. I'm no hybrid goo roo, don't claim to be. But you need to figure out how they act in that lake. Being a stocked fish might alter how they react to weather changes and such as well. Your best teacher may be, trial and error.

Something i recommend is to keep a fishing log. Record time of day, water temp, GPS numbers and the result of fishing there, how you were fishing, bait, etc....... File it by DATE. The next season, you'll be able to look back on similar or the same date, find the conditions that are close to what you'd be fishing that day, and see what you did last year. If you nailed it, repeat the scenario. If you sucked, you know to start the day doing something different. It can really save the day to have previous fishing trips info.
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[albinotrout]

Hey nice job. Glad you got the sonar figured out.[] You even caught a few fish for a dog day on the water. Not bad![cool]
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[BeginnerSteve]

Yeah we had a tough, tough day on Saturday though. I'm feeling a bit defeated. I knew it was doing to be a hard day because of all the people out for memorial day weekend but we really struggled at Merril Creek Reservoir in central jersey. We caught 2 dinky trout and a case of sun poisoning for 8 hours on the water.

Strange thing is all the people I talk to about fishing these central jersey reservoirs is they say the last 5 years or so things have been falling off, especially at Round Valley which is a really nice trophy trout lake here. I've only really gotten back into fishing the last couple years, so I couldn't say what it used to be like, but I'll say this much so far this spring there have been a lot of long days without a lot of action.
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