Day on the Sesquehana

[curtisce]

Recently someone started a thread on Bucket list SM destinations. The Sesquehana River was on it. I had heard about the New river back east but not the Sesquehana. Roll forward a few months, my son and his wife have their first baby. They live in NYC so getting to see them wasn't straight forward due to you know what. Baby was born in mid August but instead of rushing out there we waited till now and deccided to meet in the Poconos of eastern PA. Started researching and found we were within 2 hours of the Sesquehana so I looked at some websites for guides and picked a guide in the Harrisburg area which seemed the area for biggeer fish.  

    My son and I drove down and met our guide Tom Mills on City Island right in the middle oof Harrisburg. He had called about a week before saying the water was very low and we would be limited where we could fish. He gave me the option of rescheduling or canceling but that wasn't much of an option for us. He runs a locally made river boat That is best described by it name Rockzilla. It has a thick flat bottom hull that has about a half inch of a plastic polymer sheet screwed to the bottom. This makes it easy to slipp over shallow rock ledges. The sesquehana is wide, probably 1/2 mile at least but shallow. Most places it ran 3-5 feet in the area we were in. There was a short dam below us that backed to water up some. when we ran upstream it quickly got shallow and the rocks stuck out of the water and we couldn't go higher. The  bottom is a solid layer of sediment rock with some occasional loose rock. Not a lot of struture to target so we mostly threw Flukes and swimbaits hoping to find the fish that could be about anywhere. Had a tough morning boating ony 3 fish over about 4 hours. Later in the afternoon we either found a concentration of fish or they just turned on. Caught probably 10 with a few close to 3 #.Talking to the guide it seems as though the river is not as it was say 5 years ago. Number and size are down. Flathead cats which they call invasive have moved in from the river below and that may have something to do with it. 

    can't call it a great day but we had a number of things going against us. Mostly the low water that severly limited where we could go. The lack of structure made it seem like we were just casting randomly but higher water would open up areas above where more structure existed. Unfortunately though I don't think it is what it use to be. Waters change over the years. Thelaead gude from this group has actually relocated his summer operations to the St. Lawerence river.

https://www.susquehannasmallmouthguides.com    Here's a link to their site

Got to get one picture of  our grandson in, Levi Robert

The motor was a 200hp optimax powerhead turning a jet drive below.The boat had a tunnel hull andwater intake was situated uhp in the tunnnel.

 

 

Here you can see the bottom structure

[BilletHead]

          Nice Curt and thanks for sharing! We have been wondering about you guys and Foster of course. Got your Skillets done buddy. Congrats on the grandchild gramps

   Marty and Pat

[curtisce]

Foster stayed home. Excited to see skilets, one will probably stay at duck camp.