Lake Wissota, our little corner of the fishing world, has become a busy place with the FOM regional tournament coming to town in a few weeks. Bass rigs of all sorts are prowling our waters as they hope to dial in patterns that will hold for the next two weeks. Last night was a first for me…I saw a couple of guys cruising back and forth, from shore to shore, nice and slow…I imagine they had seen Doc Sampson’s video on making maps with your Lowrance and were collecting data for their own custom Wissota maps.
I was lucky enough to spend some time fishing alone for a few hours on Sunday evening, taking a break from the bass-focused trips that have kept me busy of late. Fishing for eyes followed their usual pattern….well, at least the pattern they seem to be in this year. No flow = no bites. Dam opens = mouths open. Once Jim Falls decided to start letting water through, I was able to pick up 5 nice eyes in the upper end of the slot. These fish all came on do-nothing retrieves or by dragging, using crawlers on 1/16 oz jigs. Pink/white jigs were the favored pattern last night. Shorelines and shallow sand were the preferred areas. Imparting action to the bait was definitely a deal-breaker for eyes.
Once baits started to twitch too much, it was smallie time. The fish shown below is one of a number of 15-17″ fish that fell to various patterns during the evening. I caught fish casting cranks (X-rap shad). I caught fish on B-Fish-N tackle paddletails, which are perrenial late-summer favorites of mine on Wissota. I caught fish on the new Gulp Alive leeches which I finally broke down and bought. And, of course, I caught fish on standard half-crawlers fished too fast for eyes.
Water temps in the Chip are in the low 70s and will start falling nicely with our cooler weather this week. Flows in the river are non-existant when the Jim Falls dam is not generating power. Fishing is decent now, but will really pick up with a cool down and some more water moving in the system.
