I went fishing today with my good buddy, Josh (smallieman) Kreider. We resumed our Tuesday outings last week and today, we headed above Harrisburg to fish the Susquehanna and the Juniata Rivers. That's right... a "2 fer" day!
I met Josh at 5:15 a.m. and loaded up his truck. We stopped at the garage where he keeps his jet rig, transferred my gear into the boat, hitched up the trailer to his truck, and we were on our way to breakfast.
We arrived at the ramp around 7:15 a.m. and there was absolutely no one there! That's right, we had the river all to ourselves. Well, not entirely to ourselves. We did see two other boats in the next seven hours... That's right... Just two other boats on miles of river.
That should be a clue on how good the fishing was going to be... LOL!
We got on the board pretty quick when Josh hooked into a nice 15" bass on a spinnerbait. However, it would be awhile until I nailed a small bass once again on a spinnerbait.
That was it for quite some time.
We decided to take a run and travel up the Juniata River. We ran a good distance up river until we found a nice ledge to start fishing. Josh caught a smallie on a tube and a few minutes later, under a power line, caught this sad specimen!
This poor fish was only around 12-13" in length, but was in terrible condition.
I will be sending these pics on to Dr. Bob Bachman, PFBC Commissioner. I will ask him to pass them onto the correct biologist for viewing.
We floated the Juniata for about two hours with no more fish.
The west shoreline of the Susquehanna River was running much cleaner than the Juniata River. However, the east side of the Susquehanna River was still feeling the effects of the dirty to muddy water dumping into to the main stem from the North Branch.
A little after 1:00 p.m., Josh started to hit a few smallies on the spinnerbait again. The problem was, that three came unbuttoned before we could get them into the boat. One of the three looked like a decent 16-17" smallie. That bass took a flying leap and threw the spinnerbait. Dang!! On such a slow day, it would have been nice to get 'er into the boat.
We ended the day with 7 bass. That's right 7 bass on miles of river that we fished.
The day started out with a nice bright sun and by 9:00 a.m., the clouds had rolled in. There was a wind blowing from the NW again around 5-10 mph. The water temp was 75 degrees and steady in both rivers.
The water clarity on the east side of the Susquehanna River was quite good with a 4' visibility. That broke down to about less than a foot the closer we got to the west side of the river.
We threw spinnerbaits (several different styles and weights), jerkbaits, flukes, tubes, Senko-like baits, crankbaits, lipless cranks, and Mister Twisters. Now you know it's getting bad when we resort to throwing Mister Twisters... LOL! :)
Josh did catch another type of "fish" with his tubea and with his spinnerbait... Now, the spinnerbait catch was quite impressive of this... "fish".
That's what I call "Slow Rolling" a spinnerbait in order to catch a... Crayfish! ;-)
Take care and Stay Safe!
Dad
