Lake Pleasant Fishing Report - 8/16/11

[The Hook Up Tackle]

For those of you hitting up the lake this week, I wanted to keep you updated to the conditions and the bite. The lake is still dropping about 8-12 inches a day, and is pushing the fish into a pretty solid pattern. Water temps are still in the mid 80's in the main lake to the low 90's in the back of the river.

Largemouth are starting to school up and chase bait with the stripers and whites. All of a sudden shad have shown up in the creek arms in anywhere from 1 foot to 30 foot of water, and the fish are stacked on them. Look for boils in open water to be mostly stripers, but if the boil moves toward the banks the largemouth are right there jumping in. Best baits have been skinny dippers, walking baits (gunfish, sammys, etc) and little jerkbaits (pointer 78 size). If the topwater dies, most of these fish end up suspending in the deep brush, and you can bang a spoon around here and there and catch em, but they get tough. You'd be better off just running bank with a worm and cover a ton of water and pick up a fish here and a fish there.

Stripers are, as I said, boiling well at times on the bait. On sunny bluebird days there is also a great deep bite in 60-65 feet in the ditches of the channels. These fish are solid 3-6 pound fish, and will eat spoons, chovies and heavy swimbaits really well. This is the fishing you want to hit if you have kids or anyone just looking to have a blast catching. One thing I will note on these stripers, they are very line shy. Even in 60 feet, 6-8 pound fluoro makes a huge difference if you're using bait.

Good luck this week guys! If anyone needs any help feel free to stop by our shop and we will do all we can to get you hooked up.