Strawberry Day After Thanksgiving ... Added a few pics

Utah Fishing Reports & Discussion Utah Fishing General
1

Bait_Caster and I hadn’t been back to the Berry since the Salsa Boyz party. We were pretty anxious to get back down there and do some fishing for big fall cuts.

We left at 4:00 in the morning from my house and arrived at the marina around 6:30. At the ramp we met crestliner. Good to see you again Tom. After some discussion, crestliner decided to drive over to Renegade and launch from there. BC and I stayed at the main marina to launch.

South of Heber it was only 5° but up at the Berry it warmed up to 15°.

The ramp was 100% clear of any ice or snow … completely dry and launching was cake.

Fog was THICK! If it weren’t for our Lowrance fish finder with mapping GPS and a general knowledge of the Strawberry landscape, we would have gone in circles.

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We headed straight for the narrows up where the old dam was. We set out crawdad traps filled with turkey scraps from Thanksgiving dinner.

After fishing for about an hour and catching a few nice cuts, we decided to check our traps. We really wanted to try using crawfish tails for bait. But our traps were empty. We put our traps in several different locations on the lake throughout the day and never caught one single dad all day! Go figure.

However, the fish catching was consistent all day long with no times when it was hot or not.

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We tried a few new lures and techniques. We tried a new color of tube jig that did work very well. It was mostly transparent and it’s color was kind of a very light motor oil with sparkle flecks that included red flecks. I think it’s color kind of resembled chub. Anyway, it, tipped with chub, worked very good.

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We tried so many different things yesterday that we never even got around to using the standard go-to white tube jig.

We even trolled Lucky Craft Pointers behind lead core line with 100 feet of leader. Worked very well south of Haw’s Point and in the big bay NW of the Renegade ramp.

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Speaking of Lucky Craft Pointers, my new favorite LCP is the deep diver (DD) rather than the regular shallow diver. The DD’s, when casted to the shore, would stay in the strike zone longer than the shallow pointers.

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We didn’t catch big numbers of fish yesterday but we had a great day. We each caught about a dozen fish. BC nailed some very nice bows too. We caught three cuts over the slot with the biggest one at 24 inches.

We left the water at about 4:15 and were pretty tired. At the ramp, we talked to three guys who had caught about 20 fish each. They had been “trolling” white tube jigs. Apparently they like to troll them about 2.0 mph or, if the wind is blowing, just drift them. He says that is how they always fish the Berry and do very well. Guess I will have to give that a try someday too.

There was never any wind or snow all day. Like the weather all day, the company was also great. One more good memory of fishing the berry.

2

Hey it was good to see you guys again as well. The road over was in great shape with just a few small snow and ice patches. The ramp was almost bare except for two small patches of snow. The fog made for some interesting travel but we did manage to find the point we wanted but never caught any fish casting pointer minnows. We anchored on one of our favorite spots after casting for a about an hour and only made one other move all day. We were into the fish steady all day on white tubes tipped with minnow and night crawler. The fish were hanging right on the bottom and we caught quite a few casting our jig out and jigging it back to the boat. My kid caught two over the slot right off the bat but those were the only two. All others were in the slot. We moved over by indian creek about three oclock and managed to land another dozen fish. Most were caught using the fish finder and reeling up to the ones suspended around 24 feet. All in all it was another great day on the berry. I believe I could do one more trip next week before I put the boat away and get ready for ice fishing.

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Thanks for the posts. We were waiting to hear how you did before we finalized our trip.

Go Utes!!!..

Thanks, PowerBate

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The weather was very good (except for early morning fog) and the fish were definately willing to play. Take advantage of this good weather and get down to that fantastic fishery before winter sets in.

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we caught some dads on the ends of our lines over by renegade. It was the long thing cove just north of renegade. Maybe try dropping your traps there. Sounds like it was way to cold for me lol. Wish it was warmer.

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Nice report, did you try FishNCoach point (You know where I am talking about), let me know how you did in a PM at FishNCoach point.
I will be using the new boat-not soon enough.

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I loved the picture at the end of your story…made me laugh. :slight_smile:

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Doh! Sounds like we need to communicate more! We were there also and I would have loved to hook up with you and BC!!!

Myself, my son in law Jared and his friend Ryan went Friday also. We decided ahead of time that we wanted to fish Renegade. As we got to the turnoff that goes to the main marina, and saw the thick-as-pea-soup fog, we opted to drive to Renegade and launch there. We have a nice GPS and I wasn’t concerned about hitting land masses or getting lost…but I didn’t want to hit any boats that were wandering aimlessly in the fog, plus we figured the ride down to Renegade in the truck would be much warmer than the ride to Renegade in the boat…so we drove the sometimes snowpacked road down to Renegade and launched there. It was 8 degrees at the ramp at 7:45 a.m.! We launched and made our way slowly thru the fog to our pre-marked GPS spot, (We went slow as we didn’t want to hit any float tubers or boats in the fog!!!) threw out the anchor and fished. We basically stayed in the same spot from 8:00 a.m. till 3:00 p.m when we left. The fishing was pretty consistent most of the day, with an occasional school of fish that would come thru. There were 3 schools that came through. From 9:00 till 11:00 was the best school and it was red hot action during that time. We had numerous doubles and even a triple and nonstop action during that time. We didn’t even notice the cold during that time! Another school came in from 12:00 till about 12:45, then another from 1:30 till about 2:00. At that time we added up our counts…we were at 98 fish between the 3 of us. We decided that we were not going to leave till we hit 100 fish between us and it took us a FULL HOUR to catch those last two fish to stop at an even 100! We each caught 2 or 3 over the slot with Jared catching the biggest one at 24". Ryan and Jared each had their personal best days ever on the Berry and I had my best day of 2009 so far. I think we missed more than we caught.

We were in the Blue and Grey Seaswirl. I saw a boat that looked like BC’s, but never even suspected it was actually you guys!

Conditions were wonderful and we didn’t want to leave. I think it was warmer at Strawberry in the afternoon than it was in Salt Lake!

Randy