Pepin Stripers

My first introduction to lake pepin was back in the early 90s fishing stripers. Unless there were white caps we typicaly caught close to two hundred a day out of one boat. We usualy fished the flats in front of Rush river, front of Diggers, and Deer Island. All we ever did was chase gulls.

Have been up there several times since in the last 5 years and just don’t see the gulls diving for shad any more, or if you we do it may be just a couple of minutes in a very small area.

What happened to them all? Any insight?

I don’t have any insight but have seen the same. In the early 90’s it was not unusual to have the gulls diving for long times and there were lots of boats out chasing them. Now they only dive for a couple of minutes and move on. I rarely see more than 3 or 4 boats chasing them. Anybody have a white bass fishing report? I am headed up there in about a week.

The MN DNR has some good info out there on white bass populations and they’re definitely on the decline. As the water clarity has improved the white bass populations have gone down while walleye populations have increased.

Not to make it sound like the white bass is endangered or anything. They’re not. There’s still a very healthy population. But not like it used to be 20 years ago.

Need to put some tighter limits on them. I see boats with 5 or more people in them keeping just a crap load of fish. Do I need to say anything more!!!

I’ve been trying to figure out why they don’t run like they used to for a while now also. One theory is that there seems to be more fishing pressure and so many people just troll over the top of them instead of staying outside of the school and casting in. In my opinion this breaks up the schools and drives them deeper. I think the fish have gotten conditioned to this and most of the time are feeding deeper. Even though the surface action and gull runs are shorter, the school is still sitting right there and still in a feeding frenzy. There just under the surface. I almost like this better because you still get the one fish every cast without a bunch of people running up ontop of you at 90 mph.
Also, there might not be as many as there used to be but they are a lot bigger and there definitely is not a shortage of these fish in the system. I go for one weekend a year around Labor day and it’s pretty easy to catch a limit.

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I’ve been trying to figure out why they don’t run like they used to for a while now also. One theory is that there seems to be more fishing pressure and so many people just troll over the top of them instead of staying outside of the school and casting in. In my opinion this breaks up the schools and drives them deeper. I think the fish have gotten conditioned to this and most of the time are feeding deeper. Even though the surface action and gull runs are shorter, the school is still sitting right there and still in a feeding frenzy. There just under the surface. I almost like this better because you still get the one fish every cast without a bunch of people running up ontop of you at 90 mph.
Also, there might not be as many as there used to be but they are a lot bigger and there definitely is not a shortage of these fish in the system. I go for one weekend a year around Labor day and it’s pretty easy to catch a limit.

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I think the key word here is LIMIT. There are a lot of people out there that don’t bother to count them or know that there is a limit and just keep throwing them in the cooler. Maybe a little common sense would help. I will be there later this week and when I reach my limit, I go after other species and thank God that I have been lucky.

Once people figure out that a fishing limit is much like a speed limit…

We don’t HAVE to drive that fast (in most cases), many things will get better.

Limits…Speed Limits……..Common Sense…… We could be having this conversation for a while.