Anyone Ever Fish Smith Mountain Lake for Stripers?

[Spot77]

Spending some time there at the end of the month. Looking online, they seem to have a really good Striper population.

[cletus9000]

I fished with a guide there once and we did pretty well. I would recommend doing that unless you get some good intel. For LTJ he basically putted around with sonar and side scan out where he had found fish previously and when we got on top of them we dropped precisely to their depth and vertically jigged bass assassin type lures. Very, very similar to the bay except that the fish were sometimes suspended. He actually used line counter reels to get exactly in the zone. There is a LOT of bait in that lake, so you'll show incredible marks. Only stop on the ones with rockfish marks around. Sometimes the fish will bust bait on the surface and you can get them top water sight casting. Didn't work out for us. Sometimes the lure bit is slow and they resort to live bait. They actually use in line side planer when doing this. There are some big fish there - I got about a 35 incher this trip on the jig.

[Spot77]

Thanks Cletus; that's good intel. I'm looking forward to jigging for them....

We have the use of a 21' center console while we're there, so it should be a blast spending the day out on the water.

Temps there will be in the 70's all next week.

[240 LTS]

Some of the guys on the Bay Boat Forum live/fish there.
They typically pull live bait.
Maybe contact Mike for some info.
Maybe go with him?

http://bayboatforum.proboards.com/se...0&display_as=0



.

[Spot77]

Jeff - I found some great info over there...thanks for the heads up.

Very cool how they troll so close to the shoreline.