stripers on artificials help

[Tubbytuba]

hey guys, the stripers are starting to heat up and its time i started planning my first '13 trip to the Wood. to clarify, i understand that time on the water is the most important thing to fishing, iam also not looking for your secret spots, secret lures or any other trade secrets, just need a little guidance from the jail bird masters and the more experienced. i killed a ton of dink stripers on anchovies last year (all from shore), lost a ton too :LOL: but i can count on my hands how many bites and fish i had on artificial lures and for each of those there were probably ten lure changes, countless casts, and no discernible pattern. makes me feel like im doing something wrong. i have a few LC 110's to throw at the boils in the coming weeks, if this is a waste of time i'd like to know :Big Grin: also, im wiling to spend a little money to make this happen, but i prefer to fish the shore line. any suggestions that steer me in the right direction would be nice, and if anyone wants to pick my brain for trout creek knowledge, or how to fill a stringer with bait n wait dinks in return, shoot me a PM. thanks everyone

Good Hunting.

[seal]

Early and late would be best from shore. There is a cycle to the fishing patterns of stripers, you talk about boils. At Silverwood the bigger boils that everybody gets excited about are generally a mid to late summer into early fall period. This is when you can catch them on spooks the LC basically any shad imitaion or silverside imitation (silversides are thick at Silverwood). Also some years they really key on LMB fry, last year that certainly was the case, so an LMB imitation can be good during the same time periods. In late Spring and early Summer the schoolie size stripers will "slurp" which is basically a boil where you just see a small disturbance on the surface of the water rather than big blow up, when they are slurping they are targeting recently born fish which are referred to as "larvae". During the slurps you need to downsize your presentation, basically match the hatch. There are all kinds of lures that mimick larvae, I use the Lakefork model quite a bit, the challenge is the small size of the lure and wanting to get it out to the fish. We've started using a bubble just like you would a fly and bubble technique, I call it fry and bubble. This is an excellent method to get the bait out there and into the slurps and also keep it in the top of the water column.


There are so many ways to target them, lipless cranks, flukes etc... etc.... etc... Still one of the more productive ways to fish is with a silver Kastmaster type lure, you can sling them a mile and get out to where the bigger fish might be holding since you would rather shore fish. There are plenty of adult shad boils in the water but they tend to not come up and shallow till late summer like I said before but still adult shad patterns will whack um early and late in the day and from here on out it's only going to get more productive.

Do not get caught up in the swimbait deal, it's way too expensive and becomes addictive, trust me I've made the mistake and keep paying for it:LOL:!

[Tubbytuba]

seal delivers! thank you very much that was quite informative. i know how it feels to be addicted to a certain method. i chased carp last summer on the fly and i cant seem to stop thinking about it (and pouring money into my gear). i'll take a bunch of my castmasters, i have a million. last time i stayed away from using spoons after about cast number 1,000,000,000,000, they just looked too mundane, but i was fishing them in the middle of the day. ill make sure to pitch some lures during low light and thanks for clarifying the difference between boils and "Slurps". now that i think about it i know exactly what you were talking about and i feel like i have some flies that would work. thank you again :Smile:

Good Hunting

[HawgZWylde]

I don't know about the Wood, but when Stripey was more prevalent down here at DVL a few years back, I threw a white or lead colored lead head with a 3 inch white Big Hammer tail with great success. Actually, ridiculous success...

[seal]

Yea I didn't even mention the fluke scrounger combo or one of our favorites out at Mead which is just a basic darter head with 3" Berkley Gulp curly tail minnow, so much stuff will work when they are active, last year the new Storm suspending shad bait was killing um at the end of the year after the topwater action subsided.

[Tubbytuba]

im sensing a pattern with the white colors... big hammers will catch anything i caught a few last year on them but they were few and very very far between. that's why i couldn't tell if i was keying in on a pattern or just finding some random biters. cant remember the specific color but they were white with a blue top.

Good Huinting

[HawgZWylde]

im sensing a pattern with the white colors... big hammers will catch anything i caught a few last year on them but they were few and very very far between. that's why i couldn't tell if i was keying in on a pattern or just finding some random biters. cant remember the specific color but they were white with a blue top.

Good Huinting

The Fall bite after the launch ramp at DVL re-opened was nothing short of ridiculous. Massive Striper (and LMB) boils all over the lake. We had some Striper boils that lasted nearly 20-30 minutes. You had to keep a pile of those things next to you because the fish were so aggressive they tore them up fast. White, and white/black back were the key. Cast past the boil and burn it back. But that was when DVL also had a massive amount of Shad and the lake was drawn down nearly 90 ft...

[Jmac]

Went out to wood this morning. Never knew the difference between slurping and boiling until after reading Seal's information and watching the boils this morning. Threw a trout pattern lunker punker at them. Wasn't getting any love. Finally they threw me a bone and would take a swipe at my bait almost toying with it. Happened for about 3 cast in a row. Then the sun came up and it turned off!

[seal]

seal delivers! thank you very much that was quite informative. i know how it feels to be addicted to a certain method. i chased carp last summer on the fly and i cant seem to stop thinking about it (and pouring money into my gear). i'll take a bunch of my castmasters, i have a million. last time i stayed away from using spoons after about cast number 1,000,000,000,000, they just looked too mundane, but i was fishing them in the middle of the day. ill make sure to pitch some lures during low light and thanks for clarifying the difference between boils and "Slurps". now that i think about it i know exactly what you were talking about and i feel like i have some flies that would work. thank you again :Smile:

Good Hunting

If you toss the fly at the Wood make sure you have a big black wooly bugger, not much flash just big and black. The bigger stripers will slam um as will LMB's, trout, bluegill etc.... If targeting stripers make sure and use an aggressive strip.

[Skyler]

Storm shad swimbaits, Krocodile spoons, and white bucktail jigs are my go-to lures. A soft jerkbait on a dropshot can work well also if you know the strike zone.

[DarkShadow]

I once flipped the top of a soda can across Lake Mead's surface when i was a kid and didn't know any better, and watched in disbelief as it got boiled on and presumably eaten by a striper.

Essentially, your options are pretty extensive when it comes to artificials. In fact, during WFO bites, I leave all the plastics in my box and throw out hard baits that I can reuse over and over.