Carters Lake Fishing Report – October 2019

Carters: Level: Full pool. Temp: 78 degrees. Clarity: 12 feet.

Linesides: Guide Eric Crowley reports, “Hopefully we will start to see a cool down this month. It’s been a hot, dry summer, especially in the last few weeks. The stripers have been slowly moving up in the water column and into a more manageable depth of 50 to 60 feet. This allows them to be targeted with multiple techniques. The live-bait bite has been better on cloudy days with fresh-caught threadfin and alewive, the bigger the better. We are still catching bait with big Humpback nets and the HydroGlow lights before sunrise. Light line and small hooks have helped a lot in the super clear water. We have been staggering baits from 30 to 50 feet down and keeping the boat moving. Most of our efforts have been focused on main-lake points and humps or in water just adjacent to these areas. On bright, sunny days, we have been having better luck on artificials. Capt. Mack’s U-rigs have been a go to in the last month. Switching trailer colors until you find the productive combination is key, so keep a variety of options on board. We are pulling the rigs at 3.0 mph and varying the distance behind the boat from 100 to 175 feet. This technique is more focused on open water, usually over a deeper bottom near the river channel or in the creek mouths. I like to mark waypoints as I’m trolling and build a track I can follow up on a few times to go over any fishy areas with the different color rigs. If you want to simplify this, you can pull Chipmunk Jigs the same way at slower speeds and with lighter gear, if you’re not set up for umbrella rigs. Either way you’re looking for a reaction strike by giving the fish a highly desired target and less time to inspect the bait. We won’t see much cooler temps this month, but keep and eye out near Halloween as the fish start to move up even more and start targeting bigger baits up shallow. Good luck out there.”