Perfect Day for Pickerel

We had a plan when we started the day… to go up the river to get to the western side of Umbagog Lake so that we could do some Bass fishing. Unfortunately the plan never happened. Instead, we found a small cove not one hundred yards away from where we launched and that cove is where we stayed all day. How could we leave when the Pickerel were hitting tons? We were catching good quality fish all day.

We launched our boat at 7 a.m. and within minutes we discovered the cove. We only went in to see what it looked like, but one cast and one fish later and we knew that the plan was out the window. We caught so many pickerel that we lost count, but the thing that amazed us was the number of large pickerel in the cove.

At Noon we stopped to have lunch at an abandoned camp site that we found in the woods. We took half an hour to eat and then it was back to the water. In the first half of the day we found that the Pickerel were in the shallow to 3′ depth of water, hiding in the weeds. A slow jerky retrieve produced the hits that convinced us that fishing the cove was a good idea. After lunch though we discovered that the larger Pickerel had moved into the deeper channel in the middle where the weeds were sparse. We changed to a faster and smoother retrieve which really seem to excite the Pickerel into attacking and we were able to land half a dozen good size fish each. Let me tell you, these Pickerel really put up one heck of a fight. What made this day even more special was that we were able to just have a fun time with no one worrying about how many fish they caught or how big they were. Even though we caught plenty of big fish.

I was using my general purpose fishing rod with six pound test and I switched my bait between the Sweet tater pie and the watermelon Shim-e-stik. SK Sweet Tater My brother and nephew were using the ever popular white twirl tail grub in various lengths up to 3″ and as you can tell from the photos, they were all working really well.