Fireworks ON and OFF the water 5/16/2014

The dogwoods are STILL blooming at Beltzville!  If you read my blog last week this will make sense.  Despite having tremendous success at Beltzville last week, our plan was to fish the North Branch of the Susquehanna River this weekend.  However, Mother Nature had other ideas and dumped nearly 2 inches of rain Thursday into Friday.  What to do ... what to do?  Yep, let's hit Beltzville and chase stripers again.  We launched around 9:20 and had our first fish in the boat 5 minutes later.  Simultaneously, fireworks at Penn's Peak started bursting into the mountains to our north.  We knew this was a sign of things to come.

Nice 18 inch FOOTBALL of a smallmouth to start the night off! 

And the striper bite began in 15 feet of water.  Are they finally moving up?

NOPE!  They are still deep and enjoying life chasing schools of bait fish around.

The CHUNKY eyes joined the photo session!

After a lull in the action, we put the rally caps on and WHAM! Back in the ball game.

Water temps were 61 degrees tonight.  Water clarity improved from last week.  I would estimate it to be 3-4 feet during this trip.

Sure is fun catching nice stripers like these.  We have a good idea where these guys will be ...... and at what time of the night.  

Third walleye of the night!  Add 9 stripers and 2 smallmouth to the total and we had another good night out on the lake.  Unfortunately, we did lose many fish tonight.  For some reason, we just couldn't bring them all in.  There were a good 6 or 7 fish (not to mention another BIG one) that should have been brought into the boat.  The stripers were being stubborn tonight.  Camera shy?

Steeler - 10 fish.  Chad - 5 fish.  We've been doing lots of  catching the past few trips!  Chad even catches things on the way home from fishing trips .... Z's

Until next time ... thanks for reading the "steeler" fishin' blog!