Birthday Party on the James River

Lisa booked a trip for Ezra’s birthday and he brought some family and friends on the water. We started the trip by fishing for striped bass, which was slow at first. We caught one fish right away, but nothing besides short strikes after that.

We had to play around with our speed and direction of travel until we figured out the pattern. Once we dialed those things in the fishing was phenomenal. We caught about a dozen fish in an hour and a half. Some really nice striper came in the boat.

Everybody was able to reel in a couple fish and we caught our nicest striper of the evening right before the sun started to set.

Once it started getting dark, we transitioned over to catfishing. We told the guys about the importance of fresh bait and showed them how we catch gizzard shad on the river. It took two sets of the gill net and we loaded up more than enough bait than we needed for the rest of the evening.

While, the net was setting, we were able to catch a couple white perch which we also used as bait.

The catfish bite was steady and productive with fish coming in the boat right away.

After sitting on anchor for about 15 minutes, we had two rods go down at nearly the same time. One of them was an eater size catfish and the other fish grabbed the bait and ran for the channel. This fish put up one heck of a battle and it took a while to bring him to the boat. This fish would not give up and kept digging and digging, pulling drag and running back-and-forth across the back of the rod rack. The boys were amazed to see a nice big 32 pound blue catfish hit the deck.

Welcome to the trophy club!

The bite died down in this location and we moved spots for our final 30 minutes of the trip. We barely had all the rods out when one went down and the fish started screaming drag. A short fight later and we had a really nice stripper in the boat.

A couple more small fish and that was a wrap for the trip.

Thank you for joining us on the water. We hope to see you out here again soon.