Black Moshannon Creek on the first day of trout season
Posted by PA-Smallies at 10:32 AM. Filed under: My Fishing Blog
The cold weather was on it’s way but it didn’t seem to bother the trout. After a very slow start my fishing partners and I figured the little buggers out and ended the day early with all four of us limiting out.
Our success is a little deceptiv because the vast majority of anglers we encountered on the stream had a tough time just getting bit. Most had no fish and a handful managed just a couple of trout. Read on to find out how we did it.
Time of Day
8:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m. and 12:00 noon - 1:00 p.m.
Weather Conditions
Partly Sunny, Air temperature in the high 30’s and low 40’s most of the morning. Snow storm in the forecast! Yes, in April!
Water Conditions
Water level about normal for this time year. Water temperature unknown but there was some skim ice on parts of the stream near the banks.
Pattern
We tried riffle sections with no luck. The trout were definitely holding in the deeper holes. The problem was that the trout were short striking our in-line spinners. Thirty minutes into the day we still hadn’t hooked a fish. Calling on my bass fishing experience, we developed a system of locating fish with the in-line spinners. When we would get a fish or two to follow the in-lines, we then followed up by drifting bait through the area.
The area of the Black Moshannon stream we fished was very lightly stocked so many of our fish would be “hold overs” from past years. We didn’t have the advantage of having a ton of stocked trout piled into any particular area hence the above strategie really saved the day for us.
Baits
In-line spinners were used as a locator bait and then we followed up with live bait. We used wax worms to catch all of our fish. This was the only live bait we had with us but I have a feeling the fish would have ate other live baits as well. Check out my top five live baits list for some ideas.
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