Echo 8-10-20

[wiperhunter2]

Wiperslayer and I got up to Echo today, we were on the water and fishing by 6:30 am. Wish I had brought a jacket, it was pretty chilly for the first hour or so. Headed for the inlet and we were making a ton of fish there, ended up picking up our first fish there,a chunky bow. We kept moving around trying fligs and bottom bouncing for a few hours, picking up a nice smallie that was over 15" and a few dink perch. Also saw a ton of carp slurping right on the surface, if you are a bow hunter this would be a perfect place to target practice on them. Decided to make another move around 10 am and finally found the big perch. We were vertical jigging by this time with some of TD's FT jigs, the big perch and SM bass were loving them, tipped with either a small piece of crawler or perch meat. Finally gave up around noon and headed in, with the jet ski crowd starting to make an appearance. As we were heading in we ran into a BFT member and friend Tin Can, hope you caught a few Forest.

[Cowboypirate]

I thought I recognized your boat. I hit Rockport early as I had to be back early (will post a report later). Drove the old road home around Echo to see how crowded it was. Thought I recognized your rig out catching some sun- glad it was more than sun. Those are some nice fatties ( the perch) I would never disparage good fishing friends.

Were they deep,?

[wiperhunter2]

I thought I recognized your boat. I hit Rockport early as I had to be back early (will post a report later). Drove the old road home around Echo to see how crowded it was. Thought I recognized your rig out catching some sun- glad it was more than sun. Those are some nice fatties ( the perch) I would never disparage good fishing friends.

Were they deep,?

Not really, in 10 to 13 FOW.

[Jmorfish]

Nice going Curtis -- good looking catch....When you're vertical jigging out of your boat, do you set up a portable fish finder, like for ice fishing, so you can watch fish and your presentation? or just use your boat's trolling fish finder?

[JArner]

Nice report and some healthy perch there. Need to get up there soon.

[wiperhunter2]

Nice going Curtis -- good looking catch....When you're vertical jigging out of your boat, do you set up a portable fish finder, like for ice fishing, so you can watch fish and your presentation? or just use your boat's trolling fish finder?

Just your regular boat fish finder works great Joe, you don't really need to see your jig to catch them, just make sure you are in a spot where the fish are moving through regularly. If you are seeing the big hoards of fish, like the pic above you are in the wrong stop, find a spot where smaller groups are coming through close to or on the bottom. When the fish quite coming through, we would move, usually not much, either down the shore line a little or as we noticed, as it got later in the morning, they were going out a little deeper. We started out catching them in 10 fow, we ended up over a couple hours of fishing, moving out into 13 FOW. We were still catching them when we left at noon but it was getting hot and the crowds were showing up. We were using spot lock to hold us in place but if you don't lave that I'm sure an anchor would work too. We were trying different methods to see what worked best but if we had started vertical jigging earlier in the morning, I bet we would have done even better.

[lovetofish]

Those are some nice fat perch. I was going to go up there last week until they closed I-80 because of the fire. I'm going to try and make it this week.

[TubeDude]

Looks like I left you a few.  Glad you found them.

Hope you kept some smaller ones for fliggin' Willard.

[wiperhunter2]

Looks like I left you a few.  Glad you found them.

Hope you kept some smaller ones for fliggin' Willard.

So grateful you left us a few , no we did not keep any for Willard, maybe on the next trip. This was more of a scouting and learning trip, now we have some of it figured out, we will likely make more trips in the future to see if we can duplicate and improve on this last trip.