Strawberry from Shore - mass chub sighting

[love2fishUtah]

One of my sons wanted to go fishing with me for fathers day. We usually fish in a 13' inflatable kayak setup but it was too windy so we found a spot on the west bank that was protected from the wind. We fished from 5-9pm. Caught first fish in about 30 seconds, then as it often goes nothing for about 30 mins. Then things picked up as time edged toward evening and we had some good action. We landed well over 20 fish One 16" rainbow, 3 chub, and the rest slot cutts (16-22"). We lost count of how many we landed during an hour stretch where we often had two on and they were hitting within a minute or two of getting our lines back out. We caught all but two on just a bobber and worm.

The lake level is high and the water was pretty clear. One thing I had never seen before was school after school of chub swimming north along the shore line, in about 3-4' of water. We saw one school of about 50 fish and thought that was weird, then another came 50 feet behind it and then another and another. No doubt we saw thousands swim by as the schools never stopped swimming by, with each school containing 30-100+ fish. They all looked to be 12+" long as well. I had never seen anything like it. In fact, my son and I had never caught a chub at Strawberry until that day, we caught 3 very fat chub. Maybe this action has something to do with chub spawning. We didn't cut the chub open to see if there where eggs, but they were very fat. Others here might know about this behavior.

Pictures show water clarity and how healthy the cutts look.

Shore fishing at Strawberry can be pretty productive and a lot of fun some days. This was one of those days.
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[liketrolling]

in the early spring and late fall I see a lot of chubs on the fish finder fishing in the boat
in the summer they must move to shallow water.
I think I can tell where you are fishing at, but not sure.
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[love2fishUtah]

I think it was one of your posts or the time I went fishing with you for Kokanee that I learned that those massive amounts of fish that show up on my fish finder are chub. Now I see how they really do school up and are of pretty good size to light up the screen when going over them. Until I learned that I always wondered why we could not get them to bite.

On the location, you are probably correct, base on how you know Strawberry. It's our go to place when it is windy, or I take my kids for a fun time.
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[sharksugar101]

Sounds like a fun day. Worm and a bobber was always my favorite way of fishing when I was a youngster, except when the fish weren't biting I would start to get dizzy from looking at my bobber too long. Seems like the last time I was up there ( 2 years ago) we caught alot of chubs trolling. Don't know if they're becoming a problem like they use to be when they poisoned it?
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[Anglinarcher]

As long as the schools are not of small chubs, it is not that big of a deal. a 12" chub is very old and chubs can live a long long time.

It is spawn time and the young chubs will become what the slot and bigger cutties eat.

Still, good to hear of the reports so we, as fishermen, are keeping track of them. If we see schools of 6" chubs, then I would say time to be concerned.
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[Kent]

Many moons ago, I used to always take my casting net with me and catch a bunch of chubs and red-sided shiners off of the docks and then go fishing. It didn't take long to catch my bait. I once caught over 100 chubs and red-sided shiners with one cast of my net. For the past several years, the red-sided shiners have completely disappeared and the smaller chubs are few in numbers. I am lucky to catch any chubs when I cast my net. The chubs were coming back until they changed the slot limit to the current rules. As was stated in a previous post, chubs live for a long time (I have heard that they live over 20 years). I believe essentially all of the young chubs are being eaten every year by the cutthroats and the rainbows (yes they also eat chubs, just not as aggressively as the cutthroat do) and in a few years the chubs will disappear from Strawberry, like they have from Starvation Reservoir.
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[OCF]

The last couple of years, you could see schools of 100's if not 1000's of large chubs swimming out in the open of the reservoir - end of June, first part of July. I think they are feeding on the same plankton the kokes feed on. I have caught a lot of kokes fishing under these schools of chubs.

Here are some photos from last year, not the large schools I have seen in the previous years.
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