Fishing Report, May 5
May 5, 2007
We’ve been seeing a nice crop of stripers lately. Here’s Dale Milam with some nice keepers from Friday.
Read on for all the latest fishing report action from the Feather, American, Bay, etc…
Feather River
On the Feather yesterday, we started out tossing Pencil Poppers and immediately caught two nice fish on top and missed a couple others that boiled on the lures. We then switched to dunking sardines, which resulted in some dink-style action. After that, I had the guys start throwing jerkbaits and we found a nice pod of fish and had lots of doubles and probably hooked in the neighborhood of 30 keeper stripers.
The biggest for the day was 8 pounds and most were cookie-cutter schoolies in the 4-5 pound range. Lots of fun!
The next day, I ran a trout trip on the Sac and we ended up with 45 rainbows to 3+ pounds.
The day after that, it was back to the Feather for another good crop of stripers on a mixed bag of poppers and jerkbaits. Most of the fish were a little nicer — in the 5-pound class — and we lost one absolute beast that eventually removed both hooks off our plug. We never saw that fish…it never came up and simply swam where it wanted, not at all concerned about us.
Valley Shad
The shad bite has been up and down with the weather. Shad aren’t huge fans of rainy weather, so there were a couple tough days during the week. However, the sun’s back out and we’re supposed to be in the 80’s and 90’s all week, so that should spark some improved action.
With the water so low, the fish are going to be in different places than usual. We’ll probably have to fish lower down on the American this season and forget about the Thermalito area on the Feather and the Yuba entirely as the fish won’t come over Shanghai Falls this year.
The good news about low water is we should be able to find some HUGE concentrations of fish!
Shark Fishing
We did another shark trip last week and had a solid day with 14 sharks and 1 ray for two anglers before the wind kicked up to gale force.
This shark fishing runs all summer long and I’ll be doing trips here and there - it’s a bit of a delicate fishery, so I don’t want to hit it every day.
Light Tackle Tahoe Trips
We’re starting to gear up for our light tackle jig trips for Tahoe mackinaw, which will take place June, July and August along the quiet west shore. It’s usually very good fishing and limits are very common!
J.D… I didn’t hardly recognize Dale without a beer in his hand.Sounds like a really good day. Jim