Quillback

I went over to Beaver today, didn't launch until 10 AM, so if there was an early AM top water striper bite, I was a bit late for it. Rain in the area kept me at the house. Smallmouth bite was the best I have ever experienced on Beaver. 3.3 Keitechs on 1/4 oz heads - Beaver is always a bit different than TR, but I have to think that down on the lower end of TR you could get some brown fish right now.

Launched the boat at 0600, clear skies, just a little bit of a breeze in spots, water was greenish stained with 6 feet or so of viz, with scattered debris floating around. Mike M was in the boat with me. We went up Indian creek a ways intending to bass fish, but we started seeing stripers chasing shad on top, so needless to say, we started throwing top waters at them. Had some pretty spectacular blow ups on the walk the dog baits, but most were missing the bait, had a couple knock my spook three feet in the air, always fun just to see the blowups. We boated a couple of 5 pounders, and I lost a bigger fish in the trees. The stripers stopped once the sun hit the water, so back in the cove we went to bang the cover for bass. Couldn't find much of bite shallow, we caught a few spots on various baits, c-rig lizard, shaky head mainly but just weren't getting a whole lot of action. We decided to fish some bare, rocky smallmouth banks with Keitechs and we started to pick up a fair number of smallies, Mike caught one that was just short of 18" and had another to the net that got off that looked to be a bit bigger. For whatever reason the smallies were up shallow, 3-10 FOW for the most part. We ended up with about 25 bass, maybe 7 or 8 keeper sized smallies. Water temps got as high as 68, air temps hit 88 when we left.

Launched at 0600, sun was already just about over the hill by then, looks like I'll have to get there earlier in the future, love the early morning fishing. Had a really good top water bite early, it lasted until about 9 AM. Fish were in front of the buck brush. Walked the dog, Yellow Magic Havana. Put about 15 top water fish in the boat, had another 10 or so toss the bait, and probably had 50 blow ups total, maybe more. Lots of fish missing it. Not for lack of effort, they were really trying, some pretty neat blow ups, I enjoyed it, but there were a few good ones I would have liked to have boated. Caught several keepers, smallies and largemouth, saw one big largemouth that rolled on the bait a couple of times but never grabbed it. They just shut off at 9 AM, I mean it was like a switch was thrown or something. Fished Keitechs for a while, never got much going on the Keitech, caught 5 bass on it. Carp are spawning, bluegills are on the bank now, I saw surface WT of 71 when I left. Water is stained green around point 23, up by point 25 it is stained brown.