Fish in propwash by James???

A week or so ago James and others mentioned the prop wash thing. Caring it to an extreme a recent article in FLW outdoors says that one of the patterns on a particular body of water is to follow the ferry from one side of a river to the other and as it docks on each side fish the propeller wash. Author claims he has won at least one tourney this way. He actually found it accidentally one day while waiting for the ferry to get out of the way. It is apparently a cable ferry like we have over at Lake Wisconsin(WI. River), so the cables don’t allow you to pass whenever you are close to the Ferry. Again like you guys supposed in you post it appears that the stirring up of bait and everything is a big bite promoter. As soon as the ferry gets a little distance away the bite stops. The author says apparently the sound of the props is the signal to the fish that it is time to feed.

I have observed a slight variation of the “Fishing in Propwash” phenomenum. When fishing a small local lake 5 years ago, I discovered this. I am always making that final attempt to catch a fish before going home for the evening. I was at the ramp and waiting as I was 5th or 6th in line for the courtesy dock. I continued fishing with a crawdad type bait because on an earlier evening I had observe 100’s of crawdads in the water on the concrete of the ramp. They were all over the place. Anytime time you walked up to the waters edge, the crawdads would do their wild withdrawal to the rocks on each side or scatter into deeper water. I had been thinking about that so that evening when I was waiting I tossed my bait into the propwash of boats as they ran up onto their trailers. I caught 6 bass in 9 casts. The biggest was 4 pounds and I lost a nice fish that broke off when making a high speed run for the middle of the lake! I made a habit of fishing this method whenever the opportunity came up and caught many bass from behind leaving boats. I am certain the propwash is washing crawdads back from the ramp and bass are waiting to ambush them as they tumble like bass candy in the turbuent water. Give it a try sometime, you’re in for a pleasant surprise.

Hmmmm… Small local lake… Tons of crawdads…. busy ramps…

Wonder where that was?

This is one of the “minor” patterns on Lake Erie- to follow the tugs over to the bass islands and fish the backwash with white tubes- timed milk run at its finest!

On the river the barges move enough water and change the current on wing dams enough as they pass that I often see a feeding spurt just as the barge approaches the dam I’m fishing and then a short time after it passes. A guy with some extra energy can hop ahead of these barges, fish quick and then be on to the next dam waiting for the barge to stir things up. Not relaxing fishing by any means but it seems to really work well when the flows get real low in the summer.