Posted 6/30/08: Lake McConaughy

June 19-22

The white bass fishing at Lake McConaughy was really good the four days we were there. Unfortunately the walleye fishing was pretty slow. In fact, the first three days we were there we only managed to catch one eye that was a whopping 8" long. This wasn't what we wanted for the two Nebraska Walleye tourneys over the weekend.

We fished the dam casting spinner baits and Lytle secret tail spinners for a few hours and I did manage to catch one 10 pound wiper but, that was about it so we decided to troll cranks. The main area that we covered were the 1st 2 points on the south side of the dam, Kelly Bay, Vans on the south side and then on the North side of the lake we trolled No Name Bay, Arthur Bay, Lemoyne, North Shore and the Castle. We did catch the 8" long walleye at the castle area. We then zigzagged our way in and out of the tree line across the Sand Point area to the Crappie Hole area. Just as we were in the mouth of the river I had a big fish on but we lost it about 2' from the boat. We got to see the swirl but no fish. That is how discolored the water was up there. It definitely fought like the right species but we had no proof. As you can tell, we really didn't have a pattern for the tournaments.

Saturday, Tourney #1: Dave and I made the decision to go to where we at least had caught a short fish and also where we lost the big fish that we didn't see and troll. We thought that if the fishing for eyes is really that slow we would be better covering water than slowing down with live bait. We covered the same course as I explained in the above paragraph. By the time we reached the crappie hole area on the south side of the lake we saw a friend of ours net a nice fish. Later on we talked to him and he already had 2 fish in the box. We worked this area until about noon and then decided to try some different areas. That was our mistake, we had a zero for the Saturday tourney. Our friend however, ended up with 4 fish weighing over 19 pounds and won the tournament! He was hot and did a great job. There were 67 teams in the Saturday tournament with only 18 teams weighing in a fish.

Sunday, Tourney #2: Before the start of the Sunday Tourney, we felt that we had no choice but to go back to the area by the crappie hole. On the 2nd pass, we caught a 15.25" long eye so at least the skunk was out of the box. We made a couple more passes with no success except for 1 white bass after the other. So I decided to change crankbaits and run a little shallower. I put on a #5 blue shad glass shad rap and put it behind the boat about 39'. We were trolling in 9.5-11' of water. We didn't go about 300 yards and that rod bent over. We landed the fish and it was a nice 7.89 pounds. About 5 minutes later we got another 17.5" eye on the same crank bait. About noon, I caught another 16" eye on a #4 fire tiger jointed shad rap. We were happy, we had 2 hours to catch 1 more for our limit. Unfortunately that didn't happen. We ended up with 12.4 pounds which landed up in 6th place for the tourney. There were a lot more fish caught on Sunday. The fish were caught at Kelly Bay using slip bobbers and jigs, No Name Bay produced some nice eyes and quite a few fish were caught at Vans. There were also a lot of fish caught up by us on the west end. It is unbelievable the difference a day made. I think that the McConaughy bite is going to really take off. They are running some water out now which should make the suspended bite take off. The white bass and wiper fishing is really good now anyway, so you can definitely have a good time at McConaughy.

I am going to spend some more time at Harlan. I will let you know the results.

Hope to see you on the water!

-Bill

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