# Fishing in the mud



## onthewater102 (Jun 20, 2014)

Odd situation - river is slowing down - level and flow are dropping - but there's more silt flowing than ever. I'm up in CT where we rarely have dirty water - and I'm sure the fish didn't magically disappear, but they sure aren't behaving in any pattern. Everything I read about muddy water is usually due to rising levels - fishing the bank hasn't worked - and there is very little structure to target in the main channel.

Any thoughts / suggestions?


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## lovedr79 (Jun 21, 2014)

the fish have probably headed out looking for cleaner water. silt to fish is like dust is to us.


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## Captain Ahab (Jun 21, 2014)

What fish (species) are you looking for?


Try and find clean tributary streams - often when a river gets messed up the fish will back up into a trib and you can find them stacked up there


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## fool4fish1226 (Jun 21, 2014)

I hate to say it but Capt is right :beer: Go BA


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## onthewater102 (Jun 21, 2014)

Unfortunately this isn't the largest impound out there, 6 miles long from the 23' dam to the northern fast water, perhaps 300' wide in most places, and the tributaries aren't deep enough to hold fish - mostly hillside run-off no wider than a deer trail through the woods. There are two small streams but the water is too rocky and fast moving there to get to them with my boat. I can't imagine they'd migrate 6+ miles upstream into the fast water above the lake section of the river, but perhaps they did. It isn't any clearer, but it will have more oxygen. There are a few side ponds off the main river, but there is no boat access to them - even with the jon boat the inlets to the main river are far too narrow and shallow (maybe 3" of water at the deepest section of the inlet and only 2' or 3' wide.) Plus with all the weeds in the ponds I'd bet dollars on dimes the pike are in there pulverizing everything that moves.

These are just very bizarre conditions for this time of year - the weather in CT has been totally messed up this year - winter didn't break until half way through April - and the high water which usually ends at the end of April didn't let up until just now - so who knows...I don't even know where the mud is coming from - other than there's usually been a month of relatively low flow through the river where it usually would clean up that just hasn't happened.

As far as fish targeted it's mainly a Smallmouth and Pike fishery - though the largemouth started to gain ground a few years back when we had a few back to back dry years which allowed plenty of early season weed growth, but since 2009 it's been a mix of abnormally high flow rates and sporadic flooding the last three years. The water is too warm and slow to hold trout - they all push up into the cooler fast water until basically when the natural lakes go through their fall turnover. Primary forage is a 50/50 mix of crayfish and small forage fish (shiners, minnows, carp fry, perch, suckers etc.) Actually - the mix makes it hard - you could be on a school of 14"-17" smallies and all of a sudden a wolf pack of 3' pike comes through shredding your line and hammering the dink smallies...I've started using 50lb flourocarbon leaders so I can still attempt soft-plastic presentations but not lose lures to every toothy-slime-dart that comes along. 

It's a beautiful little piece of water - contaminated with PCB's by GE back in the 70's and earlier - so everyone bad-mouths it as being polluted and not worth fishing but the toxins don't bother the fish any so they grew without hardly ever seeing a lure. At this point the PCB's have all but broken down (<5yr half-life), but I'm still 100% catch and release.


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## onthewater102 (Jun 21, 2014)




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## Captain Ahab (Jun 22, 2014)

Looks like an awesome place - Maybe I should come up and fish it (Pike is one thing we do not have around me)


When I said tribs I did not mean you have to run into the trip - but if they are dumping clean(er) water target the mouths - even a small bit of flowing water can make a huge difference.


I would also try noisy topwater presentations fished in less then 5 feet of water - especially in the morning. That silt serves to allow the fish to feed shallow and still hide from birds - so i would certainly look shallow and if there are weeds or grass around those. 

get yourself some spooks, torpedoes and a big black jitterbug - I like dark colors as they tend to silhouette in low light conditions.


Let us know


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## onthewater102 (Jun 22, 2014)

[url=https://www.tinboats.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=356659#p356659 said:


> Captain Ahab » 22 Jun 2014, 08:08[/url]"]Looks like an awesome place - Maybe I should come up and fish it (Pike is one thing we do not have around me)...



I decked a lightweight 14' jon because it's the only thing we can carry in and get on the river with...I've got a 18' bass boat that I'm selling because I can't get it on the river behind the house - and the fishing back there is usually so good that there's no point in going anywhere else around here so the boat sits. That, and having 2 young kids there just isn't time to be driving somewhere, launching, pulling the boat out & gunning it home...this way I'm on the water before the kids are up and off the water before my wife is pissed.

Again this morning no real topwater bite never really materialized - a few scattered fish with no obvious pattern - most came on the black buzzbait - nothing came up on anything slow moving - tried a jitterbug, spook, and some odd ball torpedo bladed thing. Water seemed a bit clearer, but my wife had to leave for work so I had to come in to take care of the baby. The few fish I saw were noticably skinnier than the ones I'd seen earlier this week - I'm assuming I'm finding immediate post-spawners and not that they're really stressed - but they had no obvious spawning dmg...hopefully this will clear up soon. I'll go pester the local ponds for the next few days until it cleans up.


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## onthewater102 (Jun 24, 2014)

Checked the tiny creeks feeding the river - nothing - they're barely 4" deep at the deepest - and while there was a small (<50sq ft) area of cleaner water along the river's edge it was all sandy silt bottom and just about as shallow as the feeder...like I said, there isn't much other than tiny mountain spring runoff draining in...

Oh, yeah, and totally skunked again.


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## Captain Ahab (Jun 25, 2014)

One more thing to try - use spinner baits with big thumpy Colorado blades - I use them at nuight with great results so I guess the muddy water would be about the same


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## onthewater102 (Jun 25, 2014)

I should have tried them - nothing else was working - typically there isn't much of a spinner bait bite here but with these conditions who knows. I've got the boat out of the water to finish the front & middle decks this weekend and then getting it back in the water. With any luck it will be back to gin clear by then but who knows with the way the weather's been this year.


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## Captain Ahab (Jun 25, 2014)

Fish them low and slow - I like a huge blade so that they really thump and can be worked pretty slowly 

Let us know


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## onthewater102 (Jun 25, 2014)

Biggest blade I've got is a #5...I'll give it a try perhaps this weekend. Water hasn't improved.


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## onthewater102 (Jul 1, 2014)

One thing about the river, once you think you've got it figured out it changes again.

In the past, the fish ignored all the woody structure (laydowns, brush piles etc.) unless they were in calm water adjacent to the current - this was like clockwork - if you found one of these spots you were in the money - but they typically get taken out by the ice in the winter and or the flooding in the spring. Anything in the water with current was devoid of life as was anything back in the slackwater away from the main channel. Large boulders on the bottom typically hold the patternable fish.

Well, that's obviously not the case when the river is running mud. I crashed the black spinnerbait w/ a gold #5 Colorado blade on it into a long-since dead tree far away from the current & boated an 18" smallie - got another (~18") off the opposite end of the tree close to the bank, again, running the bait into the tree. After that they turned off the spinnerbait, but I caught another 3 smaller keepers (we call them Housy footballs as they're the std. fare around here 14"~16" but always better than 1.5lbs, often over 2) all of which hit a 1/4 oz black jig with a rattle & a yum black/blue trailer. The long smallies were very skinny - not thinking I left my phone in my vest pocket with my scale in the truck so I can only guess at their weight but it wasn't more than 2.5lbs for sure. 

After that it was the jig's show for the rest of the night. Probably caught close to 2 dozen fish in 3hrs, none any longer than the first 2 but some which were just as heavy before I lost my last black jig to a pike - by then it was after 9 and long overdue to be home.

They were on the wood cover TIGHT!!! It didn't matter where it was located - current, slackwater, 8" deep it didn't matter - if it was deadwood it held fish. I've never found them there before but that seems to be where they're piled up for the time being. It's been years since I got the skunk out there and in the little I've fished this year I've been skunked twice...hopefully this is a return to normal going forward.


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## Captain Ahab (Jul 2, 2014)

WTG - nicely done!

You think that rivers are tough try fishing tidal areas - they change by the minute as do the fish holding spots! 


River at least changes day to day


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## onthewater102 (Jul 2, 2014)

Yeah no thank you! I'd fished natural lakes all my life until we bought the house on the river (which is a power-generating impound) so this has been enough of a learning curve!

There are very few water bodies in CT like this so there aren't too many people who know how to fish them to pick their brains...common knowledge around here is natural lakes/ flood control lakes with no current variation or impounds where the pool height varies with the power generation.

This is an OLD power station, one of the first generation of hydro-power stations built in the country so it was designed to operate constantly on the average flow through the river using the head created by the terrain through a diversion channel rather than build up a large volume of water and draw it down during peak hours, so the dam is very small and is 2 or 3 miles upstream of the power plant. There is next to no variability in the pool height behind the dam due to the power operations...which is odd for an impound. Now, mother nature is another animal entirely!


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## onthewater102 (Jul 23, 2014)

Things are finally improving! My friend was able to pull 28 smallmouth a few days ago and the water has cleared considerably since then. 

Figures - I've got the boat laid up working on the middle deck and rear bench / livewell. Taking a trip up to Maine at the end of August and I want the boat done & ready so I doubt I'll hit the local river much before then.


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