Baby shad are dying are Willard already

Utah Fishing Reports & Discussion Utah Fishing General
1

Ira and I hit Willard yesterday. Started fishing at 7:30 am and we decided to call it quits at 1:30 pm.

Water was coming down the baffles full force when we arrived and it was up about half a foot in the South marina. Water temps were lower than our last trip there, starting off at 65 but quickly rising to 69 when we got out into the bay and 74 before we left. Nice day on the water, we started off at the North dike, in the deepest water we could find 15 to 16 FOW and started marking a ton of fish, right away, mostly shad. Here is a pic of what we were seeing.

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We trolled cranks for almost 2 hours, getting a few hits but no fish to the boat but the water was murky so we started slow trolling fligs. We noticed another boat out there fishing, close to the dike, and it turned out to be Burley, good chatting with you Hue. Within minutes we had our first fish on and before we left we had brought in 9 cats up to 23". We also notice a fair amount of dead or dying shad. Not sure why they were dying, unless it had something to do with the dropping water temp.

Here is a pic of one of the shad we saw.

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2

I was out Monday evening for a couple hours noticed the same thing dead shad and lots of living shad on the graph and popping on the top of the water got a few small mouths but overall slow fishing. I picked one up to compare to my shad colored lures size and shape.

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3

I just edited my post and added a shad we saw as well and a couple of pics of my FFer.

4

Your pictures on the graph is what I saw as well didn’t seem to matter on the depth either 6 ft - 10 ft. Lots of shad this year hopefully the fish will be fat and happy for the winter months.

5

Agreed, but that is likely why they are so tight lipped, way too much food in the water, they could just swim around with their mouths open and get all they need.