Thursday, April 22, 2010

Fish are Shallow

The ice season is gone in New England and in fact the open water has been here for quite sometime. With the nice sunny warming days as of late, the local ponds are warming quite nicely. With the warming waters about us, this will bring the fish into the shallows for their spring ritual. This time of year is a perfect time to get your kids out there fishing as the action could be non-stop. Panfish and bass are invading the shorelines and can be caught with and in a variety of ways. Enjoy a nice warm summery afternoon sitting along a pond shoreline and see for yourself. In most cases it shouldn't take to much work for getting kids into some action and watching them catch these fish is something that you will take with you for years to come.

BackWoods Sportsman OutDoors
www.backwoodssportsman.com

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Fishing April 11 2010

The ice is gone and has been for quite some time and lately the rains have left and the sun has found its way to New England. With the darker waters of our local ponds this is allowing the suns rays to warm these waters much earlier this spring compared to most.

In turn, this will bring this spring spawn season weeks in advance and now is the time to get out there and enjoy some good fishing. We headed to a local pond as we only had an hour or two and my young son wanted to get his open water season underway.

With excitement in the air, fishing rod in our hands, and rigged and ready to catch fish we went to a local pond for a little shore fishing. There is an area that I like to fish here from shore that is a corner of the pond that has access to deep water, has a weed flat near shore and usually a good area for early spring fishing.

Today’s bait choice was going to be fishing T.H.E. Jig, (Totally Hot Everyday Jig) underneath a float. Color choices that were productive were the purple/green and chartreuse/white combinations. No live bait is needed when fishing these baits as these are small hair jigs that dance in the water representing insects and emerging larva.

It didn’t take long and fish were being located and caught and our first crappie of the open water season was in hand. No real big ones were caught as the general size was around 8 inches long but they were very black and won’t be long and they will be spawning.

The trick to catching fish in this area was to cast out as far as you could and had the float set at 18-24 inches in depth. We worked this area as well as a little further down the shoreline and in the short time that we were there caught 10 fish for our efforts. 4 crappies, 3 sunfish, 2 bass and a 1 perch, quite a variety of fish species as they were caught only on these two jigs.

Wanted to stay longer and see if the bigger crappies came in as the sun got lower, but my young son had other plans on his mind. All in all was a very good day out for our first open water trip and now we are pumped and ready to bring on the open water season. Next trip hopefully will be in the boat in search of largemouth bass.

BackWoods Sportsman OutDoors
www.backwoodssportsman.com