I headed up to Pepacton for the third time this year with Walt and Frank from KFA-NY. We had pretty good brown trout fishing . We all caught browns. I caught 5 browns including 3 keepers, keeping my limit with 2 17" trout. I also caught a nice 17" smallmouth. Walt had a banner day and between the three of us, we totaled over a dozen browns.
No fish stories about big trout breakoffs this time. It was a solid trout bite, but far less quality than June.
The fish were deep for the most part - 6 colors of leadcore did the trick.
We didn't get the cloud cover expected and needed. The partly cloudy weather didn't do the trick. The water surface temp still 74 degrees despite nights in the high 50s.
For the last two trips, the key to catching has been understanding that these trout behave like pelagics in this massive reservoir. Unlike the first two trips in June, the browns are no longer associating with shoreline structure and drop-offs and appear to be constantly in motion. Every brown I caught was in the thermocline at 100' - 170'.
Frank and I made a big strategy mistake. I marked a massive school of fish up and down the water column on a steep shelf near the dam. Frank wasn't marking fish, so we figured that they were alewives rather than trout, but knew that a huge school of alewives would definitely have brown trout on it. As expected, there were trout feeding on them. I saw a pod of larger browns come up hard from to the surface to slam struggling alewives. Frank saw a little mini blitz as well. But, we couldn't get trout to bite around the school and probably wasted a couple of hours working it too long. Later in the day, I was only getting hits away from my marks in open water. The trout act very nomadic as the day goes on and the sun gets higher.
Unlike the alewives, the browns don't appear to be schooled up. They are spread out across the reservoir in very small pods and not feeding too aggressively, which is expected with the bright days and heat of summer. Many of these pods are congregated near the dam. As I said earlier, there was some feeding on the upper portion of the water column as well. I had several hits letting out my lead core line. It wasn't only brown trout on the alewives, but smallmouth bass. I caught a 17" smallmouth trolling through a the school with lead core in 150' about 40' down.
With the trout moving around so much, the key to success was covering huge expanses of water, so be prepared to cover about 10 miles of total trolling if you are there for the day. Also, the action has been in the middle of the reservoir in the open water.
One of my goals this season is a NYS Catch & Release Citation for a brown trout so I've got at least one more trip left in me. I'm hoping that the big trout have one more heavy feed when the water cools off later this month before the approaching spawn changes the bite for the remainder of the season.
