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Top is boaters, bottom non boaters. Pretty tough day for everyone but a few caught some good ones.
IMG957296.jpg
IMG957295.jpg
Top is boaters, bottom non boaters. Pretty tough day for everyone but a few caught some good ones.
Hey it pretty much sucked. Hats off to Brad. 17.5 is unreal right now. I had one for 3.52 in our club Saturday. Only bite i had. Only had 3 fish total weighed in. There was a small tournament that went out of little patoka ramp. Nobody caught one. They’re just rolling the money into the classic. It’s really sad up there right now.
10/4 on that!Originally Posted by catch5
I am 6 days on Patoka without a keeper and only 2 short fish. I won’t go back there for any trail or tourney. I can blank and stay home without costing me money and time.
I fished a club tournament Saturday and weighed in one fish at 4.6lbs, caught three more short fish and that was as it for 8 hours.....conditions suck, to look at the lake you would think it would be awesome but that’s not the case.
Can anyone put up the day two results?
Hey Travis, I don't have a pic or link but I know Brad won it on the boater side. He had 2 more keepers yesterday giving him 24+ for both days. Less total fish weighed in Sunday vs Saturday. Not many Co's had any yesterday, just a few weighed a keeper.
The lake is just hurting. We just don’t anywhere near the number of fish we had in compared to just a few years ago.
Sad to hear the reports.
Is that because fisherman keeping them or the fish dying off?
Theres always tons of speculation about the condition of the bass population in that lake, it ranges from extreme water level fluctuations and the timing of , tournament pressure and mortality rates of released fish, overall boating pressure, lack of vegetation and the introduction of competitive species. I honestly don’t have the answer, I’ve fished the lake since it opened and can honestly say that the quality of the fish I catch now is much better than in years past, problem is it sometimes takes multiple trips to catch one good fish! In my opinion rather than the DNR releasing competitive species along with others meant to eat off the shad why not just continue stocking the fish people fish for..... bass, bluegill , crappie?
I don’t think it’s fisherman keeping them at all. As sad as it is to say, it is tough for someone that doesn’t have a lot of experience on that lake to even catch a keeper. I’d say most all tournament fisherman up there release most everything. That’s the one and only shining star in this whole discussion.
Its just a little bit of everything. The lake not having grass anymore I think is the biggest culprit. When a lake that is historically a grass lake loses it, the bass just really suffer. That’s just a fact.
The high water I think also hurts. With the lake being as high as it’s been last few years, it causes them to pull water all year. With this moving water, a thermocline never really sets up. This causes the fish to go deeper than they historically have. It used to seem like I never caught a fish over 16-18 feet. Now I regularly catch them in 20-24 feet. This creates another problem. Fish kill. I know tournament guys don’t want to admit it, but we have killed a ton of fish up there the last few years. The fish moving deeper is the reason. Those big girls pulled out of that deep water are just hard to keep alive. Very, very few guys know how to fizz a fish. I can’t tell you how many I’ve tried to fizz at the weigh ins, but most of the time by then it’s too late. At a USA Bassin we fished last year there were two weigh in bags filled with 3-5lb fish. In a 30 boat tournament. In a lake no bigger than patoka, I just think 3 years of that has started to take its toll. Again no proof of this, just my personal opinion.
Last is all the other species getting introduced into the lake. For some unknown reason the DNR wants to stock millions of walleye, hybrids, and these good for nothing yellow bass. I don’t know how a fry can survive with these eating machines in the lake. For the life of me I don’t understand why they don’t stock the lake with what the majority of fisherman up there are fishing for. That doesn’t surprise me though.
Again can’t really point at one thing, but In my opinion it’s just a combination of all these things that have a taken its toll. That being said Patoka is a fertile lake with good structure. If we can ever get the grass back, I think the lake will rite itself. It’s the key to life up there. If it doesn’t.....well I think this is what you can expect for the lake.
Last edited by catch5; 04-29-2019 at 06:55 PM.
You would think our DNR would be having meetings and working with COE on the high water issues at Patoka but I don’t see it. The friggin lake when built, it was designed for fishing with all the structure left in it, stocked with an abundance of fish, closed 3 years to let those stocked fish grow, before we could fish it. Now, it’s as if DNR doesn’t show or care what happens at the lake. When they stock 15-20 million 0.02 in walleye fry a year for the past few years, it’s because, they just hatched them, they have no where to put them, or feed them or let them grow bigger. Do the idiot biologists think those fry are going to live and grow without the grass beds for cover? 2nd largest lake in the state that you can’t even catch decent gills, crappies, or abundant bass like we used to catch years ago. And we have InBAss raising money and stocking bass in Mansfield and Monroe vs IDNR doing what the hell they should be doing. This state has become a joke when it comes to the management of our fisheries. There is no management.
I really Think that a lot of the bass are living out suspended now. Just hanging in the tops of standing timber or constantly moving with the huge shed schools. No reason to be on the bank when all of the food is out in those millions of shad schooled up everywhere. Seems like once the grass died, they just moved with the shad. I am yet to figure out how to catch suspended fish.
I agree with this, successful bank beating appears to be a thing of the past, that's not to say you cant catch fish doing this, but at least for me catching good quality fish with higher consistency is defiantly an offshore thing!
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