8/17

This Blog is dedicated to anyone who thinks fish. Anyone who spent all their money on a trip and got skunked, or walked a mile only to lose a big one at their feet. Anyone who's had their line break, their rod snap, or hopes and dreams of an epic bite shattered by the powers that be. This ones for you.

The weather has been awesome lately. Most summer's we're sweating our nuts off in heat and humidity but the past few weeks have been really nice. I don't know how the fishing has been going for everyone, August is typically a pretty slow time of year, but action seems decent right now.

I spent an afternoon with a caravan of friends in South Jersey one day last week, cutting up gills and chunking them on the mud bottom of a swampy Drainage to the Delaware River. We were at our old standby bowfin spot, which has served us well over the past year, producing a few bowfins for us on an average day. For whatever reason, the spot has sucked lately, it probably has something to do with fishing pressure and the amount of people who target them there now. This is the worst thing for a fisherman, to have his spot beat up by other anglers, to the point that he can't catch his target fish anymore. Thats the way fishing goes though, and honestly, I don't care enough about bowfins to worry much about it. If other people have gone there and caught fins, then thats great, they probably enjoyed catching that fish more than I, and it doesn't bother me at all. So we fished about 2 hours here, long enough to realize that it was beat and that we should try a different spot. We moved a couple miles and set up camp on a little bridge that went over a swampy looking canal and casted out our cutbaits. It was slow to start. Our first fish ended up being a pickerel who took a chunk of bluegill, a healthy one too probably around 20" in size, first time I have seen a pickerel caught on cutbait. We got turtled on just about every cast, but between the turtle runs had some action with the fins. Tricky ass fish to catch, because of their bone plated mouths and tendencies of swimming towards you when hooked, but we persisted and eventually got a couple to the bank. We left before the tiger mosquitos got bad.

The Flathead Fishing in the Schuylkill is beat to shit right now, at least for me. August is prime time for big fish but right now the going is slow. The water is low and clear and thats not motivating any big flatheads to go out and look for food. Tried twice this past week, with both nights being painfully slow, not even many runs from small fish. Had a 24lber the one night, but thats not enough to get the blood boiling, and the feeling of defeat at the end of a flathead session is hardly worth the effort of catching bait or putting in the time. Flatheads are a bitch, and the fish gods are especially unforgiving when it comes to catching large specimens. There is much pain involved in waiting for that good bite. 

Changed tactics a little bit recently and started targeting smallies in the Schuylkill, which has been surprisingly productive. Most of the fish are dinks, 8" in size, but there are still 20" fish in the river. Today I was out with my buddy Tan and we had a walleye, a grip of smallies, a largemouth and a 5lb channel cat. The biggest smallie was around 14" and they were hitting all kinds of jigs and soft plastics, pretty much anything we threw, including tubes, zoom flukes and senkos. Years ago in 2005 through 2008 it was a no brainer, you could go down to stretches of the river and catch dink smallie after dink smallie, 10, 30 or 50 in a day was easy work, and you could find better sized fish if you tried. In 2009 or 2010 those days abruptly came to an end and all of a sudden they disappeared. I don't know if it was a bad year class or what, but I had pretty much lost all hope and assumed the last smallie had been eaten by flatheads. Well here we are in 2014 and things seem back to normal.