Quote Originally Posted by etucker1959 View Post
It's not as complicated as it seems! Start with light line, 2 pound test is a good start. Now when it comes to bait their is only 3 choices. 1. Powerbait and the 3 best colors are corn, chartreuse with garlic and natural light green with garlic. (dip in garlic helps too) 2. Night crawlers blown up and dipped in garlic too and artificial's. 3. Mini jigs or powermice. Colors on the Mini jigs are white or chartreuse. As for the powermice, you only need 2 colors. Pink and white and orange and white. (dip them in garlic too) If you have all this stuff, their is no way people around you will be catching and you won't! Lol
Saw that they stocked the local cement pond on Friday and I headed out there on Saturday afternoon around 2 pm. There were about a dozen guys around, and not many people were having luck.

I left the house with 3 flies. A Black Wooly Bugger, a White Wooly Bugger and a Green Wooly Bugger. On my third cast, I get a big strike that breaks off my White Wooly Bugger, prolly due to a halfass knot. I then rigged up the Black Wooly Bugger and released a limit of trout in 45 minutes.

The key was to move around and not stay in one spot. The pond hardly has any structure, so these stocker trout will swim around the pond, rather than staying on one spot.

If I were to use non fly gear, I'd get a 6'6 or 7 foot rod with 2# test, and rig up any mini jig with a 1/64 ounce jig head, perhaps 1/32 if you need further casting distance or are fishing deeper water. (This lake hardly gets to 5 feet deep I think).

I've also taken a page out of the bass fishing book, and have drop shotted or wacky rigged Power Worms and have had good luck. Just size down, obviously. BassPro sells 1/84 and 1/100 ounce jig heads in the fly fishing section, and I use those to wacky rig the Power Worms. For the drop shotting rig, I use a size 12 Owner mosquito hook, and use a small split shot as the weight.

Vary your retrieve. Sometimes they want a faster retrieve, sometimes they want a slower retrieve.

Another thing I was noticing is that the individuals that WERE catching fish on the PowerBait had a small leader and light line. It was fascinating watching these guys catching a fish, and their neighbors who were using 3 foot leaders and 40# test wouldn't notice this and make the change. Observing people who are having success and asking yourself why they are versus people to the right and left of them is also worth doing.