WT: 36
Some warm weather over the holidays have kept the ice at bay and I was able to get out for a few days around Christmas when not busy with the family. I received a reminder over the weekend that 3 years to the day, we were actually lucky enough to catch one casting on Elk and it gave me some motivation to get back out there. I got out alone on Monday before the family got in town and focused hard on that same spot from before, casting the same purple pounder that got eaten, but unfortunately, there was no deja vu that day.
Thursday, I tried something completely new to me, vertical jigging. I bought a Bondy bait off Will at the lure swap this year and have been meaning to try it out over some open water bait. My wife also bought me an underwater camera for Christmas, so I figured jigging was the perfect way to test it out. With the family in town, I took my brother in-law out on Elk with me and found some piles of bait in the usual areas and did some jigging while he tried for perch/lakers. What was crazy to me is that alot of the bait out there was not what I had expected it to be. I did not realize Elk Lake had that much gar, but it was pretty cool to see on the new camera. We tried several different spots, from shallow to deep and it was fun to see how the bondy performs on the camera and I was surprised at how clear the picture was. Seen a ton of gar, a little bit of cisco, several lake trout, and even a burbot, but no muskies. Definitely a fun toy that should come in handy in the future. Hopefully this warm weather sticks around and I can get out a few more times before the long winter hits.
"jasonvkop" said:
What camera did you get?
The Camera is the Aqua-Vu AV715C-75 with 75' cable. Pretty fun so far. I tried it out again over the weekend over some large piles of bait I found in roughly 50' of water. To my surprise again it was very large school of giant smallmouth sitting under what appeared to be some balls of shiners. Hard to gauge the size of the fish but proportionally they all seemed to be pretty big. I did not expect to find that many smallmouth out that deep.
"jasonvkop" said:
Do you think you'll change locations if you now know 'bait' pods are actually gar/SM instead of whitefish or herring?
That's a good question…it definitely makes me rethink my strategy a bit. I've been focusing heavily on the gar area for some time now with very little success, but I've always just chalked up the lack of results as Elk being Elk. It looks great on the graph so I've always been pretty confident that I was in the right spots but now that I know it's mostly gar in that area, my confidence isn't near as high. It'll definitely make me start exploring a little more than usual in search of those herring/whitefish/perch schools.
52
35