**Yesterday’s planned floatilla on Utah Lake got blown away by Mama Nature’s hissy fit. A few of us tubers and tooners put together a quick alternate plan B trip for today on Starvation…on the first day of fall. LloydE and I ride shared to Bunny Gulch and found Wildcat94 a few minutes ahead of us. **
Pkred found his way there a while after we first three were launched and fishing. And then he took off across the lake and pretty much stayed to himself. He left early, after catching a few perch and smallmouths.
Fall has fell at Starvation. The recent cold front and “zephyrs” dropped the water temp a couple of degrees…to 61.5 at launch. It also dropped the air temp to a COOOOOOL 35 degrees. Actually it was only 22 at one place as we passed Strawberry. I had to loan Wildcat94 an extra windbreaker jacket since he had come dressed for the tropics.
The changes in water temps, along with some turbidity in the water, seems to have put the fish in WHAZZAT mode. Apparently a lot of the walleye and perch have high tailed it out of Bunny Gulch out into the main lake…the late fall pattern. But, there were surprisingly quite a few perch that went the other way and dove into shallow weed beds. We could see them in and on the weeds, with sonar, but they usually had lockjaw. Only a precious few would nibble hard enough on our jigs to be invited into our baskets. Tough fishing.
LloydE got the first fish…a dink perch. That put the jinx on him and he only got two basket perch for the rest of the day…and NO WALLEYES. The horror.
I was a few seconds behind Lloyd with my first fish. And, as with a couple of other recent trips my first fish was a nasty old chub. This one was 14 inches long but had a huge fat gut. No girth measurements. And, like several of the other chubs it absolutely swallowed the flig (floating jig) and worm. Still, it was easily unhooked and returned to the Jurassic depths.
Almost thought my sonar was belatedly cutting out on me…after hitting the road during my tube liftoff a few weeks ago. No fishes on sonar for hundreds of feet at a time…over bottom that is usually sprinkled liberally with perchkind and a few wallies. I covered a LOT of water without any encouragement from my Humminbird. That was when I figured that the fall change had scooted a lot of the fish out of the gulch.
But…Wildcat94 was picking up a few nice perch by fishing much shallower water than we had been catching our fish from previously. He was finesse vertical jigging them over the weeds and scored a couple of toad thirteens. I finally caught a few on fligs, but in water no deeper than about 26 feet. On previous trips we had to fish at least 30 feet deep to catch either perch or wallies.
We all went different directions but kept in contact by walkie talkie. Lloyd was seeing lots of fish in shallower water but was catching mostly dink perch. However, he did manage a couple of decent basket fish…in spite of the jinx.
I only had a couple of keepers in my basket when I saw a few fish on sonar in about 20 feet of water…over weeds. I tossed out the marker buoy for the first and only time today. Then I rigged for finesse vertical fishing. No wind so it was perfect. I used a smaller jig head and the red and chartreuse tube jig. I added some crawler and let it sink…SLOWWWWLY…keeping a watch on the line and touching it with my forefinger. Just before it settled into the weeds I flipped the bail and pretended I was ice fishing. Shivver, shivver, stop. Nibble, nibble, CHOMP. Game on. Over the next hour I put another half dozen hefty perch in the basket and caught a few smallmouths along with them. Nothing over about 9 inches.
**After losing a porky 12 incher by trying to lift it onto my apron instead of netting it, the fishing died for me. I guess the escapee spread the word and the fish either boogied or wised up. Nobody else was scoring much besides the occasional dink perch either, and the afternoon breeze was tuning up for its daily blow. So about 1:30 we hit the beach. Water temp was right at 64 when we got out…the same as the air temp. **
If we have a few nice days the fishing could bounce back a bit. But, I am guessing that we have gotten the best fishing out of Starvation for the summer. There will still be some good action for the bottom bouncing pros, but it will probably be in the main lake and in deeper water.
Starvation…I have hereby broken the spell you cast upon me every year…for this year. I’m going to hit a lot of other waters. Catch ya next year old girl.