Strawberry June 29 + 30 + Question

[luckybob]

Fished Strawberry Bay the 29th from noon to 5 pm. 3 fisher people caught 27 Cutts. Fished the Bay on the 30th from 6:30 am until noon caught 33 cutts. Drift trolled worms. Fish were hungry...caught 2 fish that 2 people in the boat hooked at the same time!!!
I wonder why each year there are so many Cutts in the slot and very few that are bigger that 22 inches ? Do people keep everything over 22"?? Do alot of fish die after being released?? What do you think??
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[crestliner]

what do you mean by "drift troll worms"? Is this done with weights, clear casting bubbles, etc... Sounds like you had a great couple of days. I have fished Strawbeery quite often and have only landed one cutt over the slot and that was ice fishing. Maybe they are getting stunted. Who knows. Still a great place to fish.

[luckybob]

Thread a whole worm on a worm hook. If the wind is light use no weight on your line, if the wind is stronger put on a small split shot. The idea is for your worm to stay off the bottom and drift along. Cast into the wind as far as you can. Let some line out as the wind pushes you along. Hope that helps.
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[N.E.T.O.]

Depends on how you fish. If you want to catch a lot of fish, then troll. They will all be small. If you want to catch BIG fish, then jig. Somedays you will catch a lot, somedays you will only catch a few, but they will all be BIG.

I'll share a little story with you. One day, either last summer or the summer before, I went to Strawberry with MGB. We got situated and threw out the anchor and since I already had my pole rigged with a spinner, I immediately started casting all around the boat. I was very proud of the fact that I caught a fish before Mike even had his pole in the water. It was a whopping 16 incher. (If you know Strawberry, you know that a 16 incher at Strawberry is like a minnow...) Mike just laughed and said "The big fish are on the bottom...".

I still troll or cast occasionally, but jigging is where it's at on the Berry.

Also, yes there is mortality rate on catch and release fish. Jigging and the use of lip grippers will lower the mortality rate considerably since most fish are caught in the lip.
Some reports say that the mortality rate of catch and release fish is as high as 30%. I like to think that the mortality rate of the fish I catch is closer to 5%. I try to not take them out of the water if at all possible and use lip grippers. I've witnessed some fisherman with a mortality rate of 50%. Dead fish floating all around them.

However, the biggest fish are still in that lake for a reason. They are smart.

Randy
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[Kent]

[size 1]"Depends on how you fish. If you want to catch a lot of fish, then troll. They will all be small. If you want to catch BIG fish, then jig. Somedays you will catch a lot, somedays you will only catch a few, but they will all be BIG."[/size]
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[size 1]Randy, I will agree with you except for "they will all be BIG". The average fish I have caught vertically jigging at Strawberry has been larger than the average fish I have caught vertically jigging; however, they definitely have not all been big. I have also caught the occasional large fish trolling, especially if I have trolled some larger lures. [/size]
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[luckybob]

Thanks Randy,
Someday I would like to fish with someone that knows how to jig strawberry. I have jigged for fish at Strawberry in the winter and caught my share. There must by areas that are better that others for jigging in the summer. On this last trip I had the finder on and did not see any fish on the bottom. The cutts we were catching were all in the top 4 or feet of water.
When you jig in the summer do you just cruise around alot looking for fish on the bottom?? By the way most of the fish we caught were between 18 and 21 inches long.

Rob
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[Kent]

Switching to drift trolling whole minnows, rather than crawlers, will result in more larger fish being caught. Large cutts prefer eating minnows over crawlers.
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[Kent]

Vertically jigging Strawberry with anyone other than MGB (including or perhaps especially me) will likely result in fishing with someone who believes or hopes that they know how to vertically jig it. If you are fortunate enough to fish it with MGB you will be vertically jigging with someone who knows how to catch fish up there vertically jigging. Mike will spend hours if necessary looking for the fish. The rest of us usually don't have that much patience and also we will bag vertically jigging and start to troll if vertically jigging is slow for us. Did you try trolling deeper than the top 4 feet of water? If not, I bet that they could have also been caught at depths of up to at least 45 feet deep. One way to find a good place to try vertically jigging is to troll a little deeper and if you catch a few fish in an area stop and vertically jig that area.
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[luckybob]

Hey Mr. Kent,
We were drift trolling so it is hard to say how deep we were. You know how that is. The wind changes so your bait comes up. The wind dies so you go deeper. Most of the time when we hooked a fish he was close to the surface because he broke the surface soon after being hooked. Some times they were deeper. We typically were in water that was 30 feet deep. Kent, I forgot to mention in my report that I lost a pole over board. I was taking a picture of my son with the digital camera and had set my pole in the bottom of the boat when a pesky fish grabbed my bait and took my pole overboard. I could have grabbed it but I did'nt want my camera to get wet. You did'nt snag that reel and pole I left up in the Snake River on this last Sturgeon trip did ya???

Rob
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[N.E.T.O.]

Hey Luckybob,
Kent is right...I can't really say that ALL fish caught trolling are small and ALL fish caught jigging are big, but it would be very accurate to say the the AVERAGE fish caught jigging is bigger than the AVERAGE fish caught trolling.
He is also right about another thing (2 things in a row, thats a first for Kent!), and that is that most of us that jig, really don't put in the time to find the fish like Mike (MGB) does. My technique is to spend about 15 minutes and see if I can find some fish. If I don't, I anchor over a previously known good GPS spot, and hope that the fish come in. Lately, the fish seem to really be hugging the bottom and we have caught fish even when they are so close to the bottom that they don't show on the fishfinder. (hint)

I still consider myself a rookie, but we usually judge our fishing day success (at Strawberry) on the "ratio of fish caught over the slot". Saturday for instance, we only caught 12 fish, but 4 of those were 22 inches or over. Thats a 33% over the slot ratio, and we thought that was outstanding. The ratio is usually not quite that good. Usually we can depend on at least a 10% over the slot ratio, which would be like 1 fish in 10 over the slot. And then, there are some days when we might catch 50 fish and none will be over the slot. Those are fun days, but we go home disappointed at the over-the-slot ratio.

My wife and I went with a couple in their new boat 2 or 3 weekends ago, and the jigging was slow, so we decided to troll. We caught a bunch of fish but the majority were UNDER 15 inches. We anchored in a previously marked GPS spot and started jigging. Every fish caught was OVER 19 inches! It was an outstanding object lesson.
They went out last week again (without me) and reported back that they had done the same experiment, with the same results. Bigger fish jigging...littler fish trolling.

Randy
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