LaSalle 3/29/06

Mike here with your fishing report for Lake LaSalle,Il.

Well for numbers we did great. For size we struck out. Jamie and I caught over 50 fish of all types: 10"catfish, 16" largemouth, 13" catfish, 12" smallmouth, 16" catfish, 11" yellow bass, 15" catfish, 16" drum and of course 12" CATFISH! No big blue's...

The fiddler cats or as Jamie and I call them, SAND CATS were everywhere the temps were 65° and higher, hitting everything. It was really a challenge to not catch a catfish. They'd chase a crank right to the boat like a smallie.

We were originally targeting the big Blue cats with shad but the wierd thing about that was after about 5 minutes after you put a fresh shad on, they wouldn't bite it. In fact you could throw a gulp minnow on and catch cats all day and they outfished a fresh shad by 50:1. Our shad must smell different than LaSalle shad I guess. The biggest cat we got was only 18" and that is stretching it. We hoped to catch a drum and cut that up and put it on a circle hook but by the time we got a drum we'd had enough of the catfish.

The yellow bass we got were huge, pushing almost 11 inches or more and they were really fun to catch. Couldn't find the stripers though I did hook up on one in school of busting shad but only for about 15 seconds of screaming drag.

Decided to take a break from casting and ended up doing really well (Actually I kicked Jamies butt) trolling the wind blown rocks with my new favorite crank the Reef Runner - Rip Shad in chrome.This is the same lure I did so well with at Powerton with Pete a month back.

It runs about 9' to '11' down and if you trolled it right along the base of the rocks it would get slammed by a mixed bag of catfish, largemouth, catfish, smallmouth, catfish, yellow bass, catfish, drum and of course 12" CATFISH!

I lost 3 or 4 big fish because I apparently had my drag too tight and according to Jamie was ripping the hooks right out of their mouth. I thought maybe my hooks were just dull. So I swung my Rip Shad™ to Jamie and asked him to give the hooks a sharpen while I kept the boat off the rocks and he missed a nice fish immediately after putting his rod in the holder. Sorry about that but thanks for that drag tip Jamie. I wish you would have told me sooner. I think it was intentional!

12 straight hours on the water in my boat was fun too (Thanks SteveJ) Even got Pete R on board at about 3:30 for the last 2.5 hours.

Pete of course kicked our butts with the Zip as we expected. Jamie switched over to topwater towards the end of the day and picked up several basss one pushing 17". A very interesting body of water for sure. Not much to look at but figuring out the temps is the key from what we hear/found. From our results we have a lot to learn.

Only took a couple of photos . Thanks to PeteR and Mike A for the tips and tricks.

Weather was cloudy and 46 with relatively strong winds.

I still have to reach my goal of a big striper too. Next time.