Danbury News Times 5/26/06

• The rivers are finally beginning to slow down a little, as flow rates have dropped to only about twice what they should be at this time of year. Accordingly, trout fishing has picked up some in the bigger streams like the Housatonic and Farmington Rivers.
  
• The Farmington is already under 1,000 cubic feet per second, while the Housy is expected to be in that flow range over the coming holiday weekend, barring any heavy thunderstorms.
• Lower flows and falling water levels have had beneficial effects in the major tidal rivers as well, with the striped bass fishing recovering in the lower Housatonic River following a serious decline during the recent heavy rains and hard flow.
  
• In the Connecticut River, there are still plenty of stripers up in the Enfield area, but anglers are finding they have to sort through an awful lot of schoolies to get a big fish. Eels and soft plastics that imitate eels are working best, and the best time is after dark on an incoming tide.
• Pike fishing is on the upswing in the Connecticut River as well, with the Haddam Meadows area and the mouth of the Salmon River being two of the often mentioned hot spots. Spinnerbaits, soft plastic jerkbaits and large, live minnows are the hot tickets there for pike right now.
• Out on the Sound, the schoolies and barely keeper-sized stripers are cooperating around the Norwalk Islands and Greenwich Point, but the bigger fish seem much more prevalent in the Eastern end of the Sound. Bluefish are in the Sound as well, but that fishery is pretty much confined to the eastern sound, except for a few reports of blues from the West Haven area.
• Bass fishing has been good across the state, but success is a matter of figuring out just what part of the spring cycle the fish in any given waterbody are in, and then keying on patterns specific to that stage. Pre-spawn largemouth in Candlewood for instance, are chowing down on spawning alewives, while post-spawn smallies in the same lake are beginning to move off shore to the humps and roadbeds already. Everything is post-spawn and even early-summer-type patterns in smaller ponds, but the deeper lakes to our north — places like East Twin and Wonoscopomuc haven’t seen much of the spawn yet, and many of the largemouth are still out on the mid-depth breaks, waiting for the shallows to warm.
• I had an interesting bass fishing experience last weekend on a trip to Lake Champlain. Reports I got before I left home all said that the largemouth spawn was about to kick in in earnest in the southern section of the lake, and that most of the fish were in protected backwaters. By the time I got there, the reported 58-to-60-degree water had dropped to 54 degrees, and the water level in the lake had gone up almost two feet from a week of heavy rain.
• The spinnerbait and jerkbait bite we anticipated wasn’t happening. The jig bite we expected to fall back on never materialized. We caught and released plenty of largemouth, most of them over three pounds. But we had to fall resort to places and techniques we might associate more with fishing in November than in May.
• Other anglers we talked to fared poorly because they were fishing their seasonal expectations instead of the reality of the conditions. Throwing at the bank with spinnerbaits and surface plus and constantly moving wasn’t going to cut it. It took light tackle, a drop shot rig with a four-inch worm, and a slow, tedious approach in 10 to 20 feet of water — and most important, the patience to sit and work over a school of fish once we found them — to score consistently. But while “springtime tactics” were producing four or five fish a day for most of the bass anglers we talked with, fishing like it was November produced over 100 fish for my son and I. It’s a lesson that neither of us will forget soon. [Danbury News Times, Rich Zalesk]