td1622 said:
I am sorry if this is some where else on the forum but I am just starting to fish after years and years and I have recently retired. This is what I have learned so far, Alton Baker Park is the closest place to fish for me, they stock it on Thursday and the place I set up my pole and sat down to catch my first fish was the worst place in the whole park!! So I have that straight, I found (by luck) the guy who actually stocks the place and he showed me where to fish and what bait to use but what I don't know now if what is the best way to rig my pole. Are there any diagrams anywhere on the forum that would show me the best way to rig my pole. From what I have read, and I can be way wrong, but it would be a treble hook with power bait and a sliding weight and no bobber. The leader could be a few feet long maybe even up to 3 feet long. Does that sound about right?? Or this could be totally wrong. What do you guys think???? Any better idea's???
td1622
The main thing with the technique they were describing that's easy to screw up (I forget all the time lol) is to keep the bead + sliding weight ABOVE the swivel. The intention is to allow the weight to sink hard and fast before you reel in just enough slack to keep the line taut so you can feel a strike, while the buoyancy of the power eggs/bait lifts the hook up out of the weeds and crap, so the fish can see it and take off with it. I used to get skunked with power eggs until I noticed that using only one egg, the hook wasn't lifting up out of the crap.
Leader length can vary, there's one woman I spoke with there the other day, who uses a pair of 1/8 egg weights and a leader that's 6 to 10 inches long! The extra weight sinks the rig faster and makes it easier to pull the line taut without moving it around accidentally - and the extra weight and short leader makes it super easy for her to cast while entirely seated. I swear to god she catches three times the fish I do, regardless of her two-fisted rod approach (which I secretly envy).
If you don't get a bite after five minutes or so reel it in and toss it in a different spot, and make sure you still have bait on your hook. I personally will wait ten-twenty minutes at a time often, because I'm reading a book, watching the other fishermen's setup and luck out of the corner of my eye, or just enjoying the antics of the herons and osprey.
The main tip for Alton Baker I can throw out is to go out there EARLY like 5-6am when the light is just coming up, you can see the fish jumping like crazy and they tend to be hungry.. Friday and Saturday morning after a stocking, I can usually limit out pretty quick on the canal behind Kowloon restaurant. The savviest and sanest people seem to be around there at that time of day - either chat them up or just eyeball what they're using. I've met a few people who kill it with setups I'd not have considered usable - such as the really cool person I chatted with and mentioned above, using the crazy-short leader and double-weighted line to assist in seated casting (she offered me the fish she'd kept, as I'd mentioned my grandmother was in town and she hadn't eaten fresh trout in probably twenty years), or the guy the other day who had no less than three rods (two of which seemed to get hopelessly tangled immediately, which I guess was the reason he had them all) who seemed old and savvy enough to not be using worms on a store-bought pre-made leader and hook, with about 1/32 oz of weight, casting ten feet out and actually catching a decent amount of nice fish. The deeper channels are sometimes just ten or twenty feet from shore around the canal.
I've never had luck in the ponds by the filbert orchard but I don't have a canoe, and there are definitely fish in there as I've seen the osprey-eaten skeletons. The parking lot near the dog park seems popular as well - either directly on the water east of the little bridge, or just below the little fish ladder thing on the opposite side of the bridge, where the water is swirling around and accumulating goodies from upstream.
If you aren't getting bites at dawn and they're literally jumping over your bait (happened to me on Friday, I'd toss it out, wait for 2 minutes, and then three fish would leap out of the water directly above where my hook was laying on the bottom), try using a rooster tail or other flashy spinning lure with a couple BB sized split shot, each weigh 4 or 6 inches apart (this helps keep the line from getting wrapped around the lure.) Just toss it over and past the fish who're jumping and reel it past them at a medium or fast speed - stocker trout are aggressive and when they're jumping for bugs on the surface, they'll snap at anything that comes within six feet or so. Make sure to start reeling ASAP (with a spinning reel you can start reeling while it's in midair, this will keep slack from accumulating and it'll "whip" around the lure in the opposing direction from you as it falls, so it's less likely to get tangled on the line in theory) as it'll sink into weeds if you don't pull the lure back right away..
Wal-mart has the cheapest spinning lures I've found which is important when you are learning your knots and stuff (they sell a lot of spinning lures for $1.25-1.75, and they've got a five or six-pack of different-colored ones for like 7 bucks), you should go out assuming that you're going to lose your lures and stuff either due to bad casting, underwater hazards, or bad knot-tying (I'm bad at missing a step in a few types of knots and the only way to get better is practise practise practise, preferably on lures that don't cost 8 bucks each.)
Wal-Mart also has a nice little rod-holder spike for 4 bucks and change (they're painted green and yellow go Ducks LOL!) that has a little pedal to step onto to force it into the ground - this is helpful at AB since the ground is sooooo packed with gravel a half-inch below the grass around the canal that it's pretty tough to shove a stake into the ground! If you are on the park-side, try to use the buried old concrete curb about 5-6 feet back from the bank, you can often find a seam, but I personally took a file to the spike end of my rod-holder and STILL bent it accidentally once or twice on that damn packed gravel!
I wouldn't recommend Wal-Mart for much else regarding fishing supplies and purchasing them in a cost-effective manner though, BiMart is usually cheaper and has more knowledgeable staff.
Cabela's is rad but as a newbie you may want to avoid it without going in with a game plan, you aren't going to find a very competitive price but you WILL be able to find more 'specific' lures, scents, and synthetic bait there if you decide you just have to go get a Panther Martin XXL EZYGLOW9000 or whatever, immediately. I'd recommend sniping their online deals - even their sales flyers in the paper or over holidays, are mostly bait-and-switch ads for stuff that they won't actually have on the floor in the store. And anyone you talk to in there is a little more likely to try and up-sell you than other places.
If you're looking for a certain color of power bait or eggs though because someone told you that ONLY one or another color is working, get ready to drive all over or ask them where they get theirs - most stores around here seem to have a sketchy selection of color choices so it can be a crap-shoot if you simply must find some lemon-lime colored power eggs that day.
I personally have the best turn-around for my buck off of two yellow-green (lemon-lime) colored power eggs on a small hook, with a leader between 24 and 48". At JC pond I have a lot of luck using a leader up to 5' on the south side where the water's deeper, with the carolina rig.
I try to make it there at daybreak for easy eatin' fish the first couple days after a stocking at AB and at JC for a week or so afterward, I'm the tall dude sitting on a bucket with a dog and some earphones probably in my ears, who's happy to say howdy. (old buckets with lids that work are perfect for a combination seat/lure-box/fish/drink container, I've found that carting out three or four largish objects is more obnoxious than just a rod, a bucket, and a little shoulder bag of stuff).
editor's note: sorry for the terrible grammar and typos when I put this up at first, I was at a family gathering, typing on my android tablet while surrounded by screaming kids and their parents.
