Ive had my boat in the shop getting a tune up and a few minor things fixed on it this past week. I wanted to take it out on a test run before we pull it all the way to Lake Powell next week for our family vacation, so we went to PK Wed evening for a quick trip.
We got to the water at around 5. We launched at South D&D and caught all the bait we would need on one cast thrown next to the courtesy dock. We saw tons of shad here in the 3 inch range.
Although we had live shad we ended up fishing lures very close to shore. We had noticed some small surfacing fish near trees in the water close to shore so went to investigate. Between my brother and I, we ended up catching 4 stripers. I caught 2 in the 8 pound range and my brother caught a 12 and 13 pounder. All fish caught on either 4 or 5 inch sassy shad in white. Our boat was sitting in 11 fow and I estimate that the water we caught the fish in was in the 6-8 ft range. We caught them right next to the trees.
We have pretty beefy set ups for our live bait poles, but the lure rods we caught these on are kinda light weight. It was really alot of fun really them in on 10 and 15 pound line on med rods.
The bad news is that the 13 pounder gave my brother the "Boat Record." Ive had the Boat Record for the last 3.5 years and this is his first time with the crown. He has been pretty unbearable since.
On a side note...Im very excited to be heading to Lake Powell for 5 days of striper fishing. If you would like to read about Lake Powell fishing or just enjoy reading about striper fishing you should check out
http://wayneswords.com/ . The website is ran by Wayne Gustaveson, who is a biologist and is in charge of the fishery. Check out the fishing reports that he releases every Tuesday. They are very detailed reports. They actually need fishermen to catch and harvest stripers in order to maintain the balance between the stripers and the shad. There is no limit on the amount of stripers you can keep.