Re: Fished Columbia Lake .. 1st time on Thursday
Originally posted by Barlow:<br />what's your favorite way to fish these things JT?
There's probably a dozen lakes within 100 miles of me, but the ones I frequent the most are 30,000 to 45,000 acres with depths up to 80 feet. The hybrids are mostly caught using a vertical jigging presentation with slabs (a thin hunk of lead in the general shape of a shad). <br /><br />Find a hump or a deep-water point holding schools of baitfish, mostly threadfin shad, & bounce the slab off the bottom. Sometimes those hybrids will hug the bottom so close they don't show up on the graphs. If you're marking suspended fish, obviously you want to jig at that depth. Usually find 'em on 18 to 24 or 25 foot humps surrounded by deeper water 30 or 50 feet deep. Sometimes a slow-moving sassy shad does the trick. Sometimes trolling a spoon using a hellbender as a downrigger.<br /><br />Also, we got flocks of sea gulls that attack the shad from above when the predator fish are chasing 'em up from below - it's always a sure thing when you see the birds circling & diving.<br /><br />Another good way to find 'em is, go to a lake close to the city on the weekend, look for converging boats with bending rods, and join the "boat show."<br /><br />When the weather gets to warming up they start schooling up on the surface, a lot of times mixed in with white bass, then you just drive around the lake looking for jumping fish, then cast something shiny like a castmaster spoon or a little george. Or if you like topwater lures, a chug bug or clear tiny torpedo. That ought to start up in about a month.
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<br /><br />Was a real interesting outing! As soon as we were able to locate a few schools of gizard shad it was just a matter of finding a retrieval rate they liked.
