Lake Sinclair Fishing Report – February 2008

Sinclair: Level: 1.4 feet below full pool. Temp: 44 degrees except in Little River, where temperatures are in the low to mid 50s. Clarity: Clear on most of the lake. Stained in Little River.

Bass: Poor. It only took 11 pounds to win the HD Marine at Sinclair last weekend. “It wasn’t a problem catching a limit, but they were all little,” Jim Windham said. “It’s pitiful, I ain’t seen so many small fish in my life.” Jim thinks the water is too clear, and there isn’t any stain to bring many fish up shallow. He filled a limit fishing wind-blown banks in 3 to 4 feet of water with a crankbait. He used a Bandit 200 series in chartreuse, while his partner fished one in a natural-shad pattern. Both crankbaits got bites, but Jim said he couldn’t nail down a definite pattern. “There’s no rhyme or reason. We caught ’em on the main lake, and we caught ’em in the pockets,” he said. “You just have to stay on the trolling motor and keep throwing it out there.” He was able to catch good numbers of small fish covering a lot of water, but in the four hours he spent trying to catch a kicker fish, he didn’t get a single bite throwing jigs or spinnerbaits. “In the last two weekends I’ve have five jig bites, and not one of them has been over 2 pounds,” he said. “That’s pretty pitiful. When you get a jig bite it’s supposed to be over 3 pounds.” He said some of the other fishermen had some luck spooning to shad balls in deeper water on the main lake, but those fish were also small.

Linesides: Good. The hybrids and stripers are keying on bait balls, and if you can find them feeding on a school of bait fish you can wear them out, Jim said. He recently found them in 17 feet of water off a main-lake point and wore them out for about 30 minutes jigging a spoon below the bait ball. “They’re right on the bottom,” he said. A 3/8-oz. chartreuse spoon was the ticket that day.

Crappie: Good. Allan Brown said the crappie can still be caught deep, in 20 feet of water in the main creek channels, but that the fish should start moving in shallow with three or four days of warmer weather. “It usually happens around the first of February, we’ll get a little bit of warm weather and they’ll move onto those spawning flats off the major creeks,” he said. Allan said to use your electronics to follow the fish as they move in. Rooty Creek and Crooked Creek are producing good stringers of some good fish right now — fish in the 1 1/2- to 1 3/4-lb. range. Trolling single or tandem, 1/32-oz. Triple Ripple jigs is the way to go, adjusting speed and depth to find the fish. On Sinclair John Deere and Acid Rain have been the best colors. Allan also mentioned bubblegum/chartreuse as a color to try. “All the standard colors are working,” he said. “They’re not being too picky.”