Fishing And Floating On 5/17

[cew702001]

How is the floating and fishing? Is the river up to much to float?

If you had to pick one float to fish on the Big Piney, which one would it be? I have never been on this river before.

[brianbarker]

I haven't floated it this year but the last time I was around Licking it was about right for floating. That was before this last big storm though. My favorite floats are Boiling Springs to the new Mason bridge, Hazelton to Six Crossings or High Logway eddy to Slabtown. Only the last float is less than a long full day, the other two take a while, we usually go daylight to dark. I have caught tons of big smallmouth on each float, and never fail to catch a limit of goggle-eye. The biggest smallmouth I've ever caught on piney was a 22 incher from a logjam just a few hundered yards above the takeout at Six Crossings, last year it was still there. Lots of smallies and goggle-eye on all of the floats. Any float around Ft. Wood is always good unless its Memorial Day weekend, there is some trophy water through there with lots of 15-18 inch smallies. I usually don't take anything on piney besides some 2-3 inch crawdads and 1/16 or 1/8 jigheads, and the smallies like zara puppies and pop-r's.

[CAH412]

Well I hope your float on the 17th did better than mine. I'm new to the area so my first float ever was Dog's Bluff to Mineral Springs earlier in the week before the storms hit. We went Mineral Springs to Sand Shoals on the 17th and the water was moving. We flipped our boat about halfway through and half our gear along with my prize fishing pole were never to be seen again. We refloated the same area on Wednesday and it was much better.

We're almost exclusively using roadrunner heads with large artificial grubs and doing decent on the smallmouth and larger goggle eye. Sounds like smallmouth are closer to largemouth than I previously knew. I'm still learning on the local fishing and coming from the largemouth and catfish worlds so I'm still learning.