Boone and Crockett Smallmouth and Hybrid Striped Bass

Justin headed out deer hunting again this afternoon and after sitting in an empty office for about 20 minutes I realized there was no way in the world I was going to get any work done. One phone call and an hour later I was on the lake with Chef Todd. I knew some trout would be biting, but only in my wildest dreams could I imagine that on November 11th we would have our best fishing day of the entire year.

This huge smallmouth bass has been on a feeding binge lately. Oh my goodness was she ever fat! By far my biggest smallie of the year weighing in at just under 6 lbs! I caught this fish on a yellow and blue strike king crankbait that dives 4-6 feet deep.

Chef also got a nice fat smallie. She is only 2.5 years old and her colors were amazing!

The theme of the day was to find the feeding fish and put some sort of lure in front of them to eat. Chef got this monster hybrid striper on a 4 inch berkeley gulp smelt. Everyone in Fulton County could hear him holler the moment he hooked this beast. If you were outside about 2:30 pm and thought you heard a schoolgirl yelping in the distance, now you know what you heard. This is the new lake record hybrid striper weighing in at 12 lbs! This fish was just 4 inches long when stocked in May of 2007.

We caught these schoolie stripers two at a time! My two are definitely bigger than Chefs don't you think?

Surprisingly we caught a bunch of largemouth bass in 5-7 feet of water with gulp, spinners, and crankbaits. Pretty much we threw a whole bunch of gulp, spinners, and crankbaits.

This largemouth bass is number 69 from the 2008 year class. He is an underachiever compared to his siblings and cousins and not good enough for my lake. We culled a handful of largemouth bass today that were not nearly as thick as they should be. Any bass with a relative weight less than 100% comes out!

We caught a whole bunch of nice rainbow trout today using various spinners and 4" berkeley gulp on 1/4 ounce jigheads fished near the bottom. Chef is a trout junky, he absolutely loves to fish trout with hairless mepps and bluefox and panther martin spinners. He caught fish on all of them today:

This big tank we built earlier in the week. We built it for Presley's Outdoors in Bartonville with a cool camouflage theme, but for some reason they decided they didn't want it anymore. It was going to have tiger musky and northern pike in it that people could feed fathead minnows to, but now it will be headed to someone's basement. If anyone is interested in it just shoot me an email.