Lake Mohawk - Sleepy Lagoon Shore Fishing Secrets

The word around the Lake (Mohawk) is the best fishing is in the southwestern end of the lake.  Since I have yet to register my kayak with the community yet, I have been reduced to shore fishing, so I have been doing a lot of fishing from Sleepy Lagoon, aka Beach #7.  It offers a nice "T" shaped dock as well as two pieces of shoreline.  On the left shoreline, there are some rocks off shore, two are visible above water. Here is the my recipe for success at Sleepy Lagoon.

Lure

I love the 4-inch watermelon\black fleck senko, rigged wacky-style with a size 1 hook.  For whatever reason, I have found an incredible amount of success withe lure.  And given the setup, it has cost me a lot of money as well.  One thing I have started to do is rig up the wacky-rig with a small black plastic O-ring.

Location #1

There is a drainage pipe exiting the small Lagoon and entering the Lake Mohawk.  About 4 to 10 feet out from this drainage pipe always yields a strike for me.  One tip to being successful here is not to to walk straight up to the water and start casting.  Try casting a good 4 to 5 feet behind the shoreline; you want to make sure the bass cannot see you!

Location #2

If you are standing on shore and facing the dock, there are two rocks jetting up above the surface to your left, which will usually hold a turtle or two sun-bathing.  Going in the direction further out into the lake, there are multiple other rocks, however submerged below the surface of the water.  After 3:00, if you walk along the shore of Beach #7 to the left and look back at the visible rocks, with the help of the sun, you will see these other submerged rocks.  Casting out in the direction of these submerged rocks always yield a strike, although I have never caught anything of significant size from here.

Location #3

The actual small lagoon.  Yes, there are bass in there and some may even be a pound or two.  I know, I have caught about 20 from the primary lake and released them in the lagoon.  At times you can sight fish for them here, or just try dropping the wacky-rig off the side of the floating yellow slide.  Be warned, the majority of the fish in this lagoon have already been caught by a 4-inch watermelon wacky-rig worm once, so don't be afraid to try something different here.

Location #4

If you walk out to the end of the "T" dock, make a right and walk to the end of the of the "T", try casting across the water to the opposite boat house.  This location yields (on average) the biggest fish of the three spots.  

1 pound, 4 ounce largemouth from Location #4 yesterday.

Location #?

There is one more location that consistently yields big bass, but I am going to leave this one a mystery.  I mean, it's not really fishing if you are not actively looking for better fishing holes, right?

I have had amazing success at Sleepy Lagoon so far this year.  I realized how successful I was last night, while sitting on my wife's computer, I could not help notice my thumb.  My thumb had developed a very rough and callous texture from lipping so many bass this week.

"Setting the Hook"

This weekend I landed an 18 inch Largemouth on Saturday and then a 21 1/4 inch Largemouth on Sunday.  Both of them were hooked with a green 7-inch power worm on a Texas rig.  I am fairly certain of two things which enable me consistently catch really big fish; 1) Fishing deep water 2) Using a big bait.  

But today I wanted to share my knowledge on how I set the hook on these big fish.  

The first thing I do when I feel a fish pick up my worm is to point the rod tip at the fish and slowly reel in any slack.  Once I feel I have taken up all the slack, I know I have pressure on the line.  The next step takes a bit of imagination, but at this point I imagine the bass' mouth is shut and he is swimming around with my plastic worm and hook inside his closed mouth.  I will then raise my pole from the 9:00 position to about the 10:30 position, or until I feel the weight of the fish.  What I am trying to do here is bring that worm and hook to the front of the bass' mouth.  For an analogy, imagine somebody pulling a spaghetti noodle out of your mouth and all you can do to try and stop it is to hold the noodle with your lips; unless at the end of that noodle there was a big meatball you could hold on to.  This is how I imagine the fishing line coming out of the bass' mouth.  At this time the eye of the hook is at the front of the bass' mouth (with the worm) and the pointy side of the hook is resting against the inside of  the bass' mouth, lined up like a surgeon resting the head of a needle against your skin.  When I bring my rod from the 10:30 position to the 12:00 position, I simultaneous give a the line a quick jerk by flipping my wrist to "pop" the hook quickly through the bass' mouth (hopefully, the top).

 In all, it is a little exhaustive process but I feel it gives me the strongest hook-set without without "ripping" the fish's mouth, gutting him with the hook or poking his eye out.

Here is the 18 inch Largemouth I caught Saturday using this hook set technique.

Texas Rigging in Early Spring

Last year I was really turned on to the Wacky-Rig 4" and 5" Senkos for fishing the Delaware.  And I learned what kind of awesome tool the Senko is in the river.  However, this Spring I am back to lake fishing and there is no greater setup then the 7" Power Worm on a Texas Rig.  My color of choice is dark green with black flecks.  I also like to put 3 or 4 red beads on my line as I feel their 'clacking' together resembles the Largemouth Bass' #1 predator during spawning season, the crawdad.

I usually put the Texas Rig worm weight on as it gives me more range and accuracy when I am fishing from my kayak.  However, given my new home at Lake Mohawk and my fishing from the docks, I suspect I'll do more flipping and will go with the natural fall of the worm.

Silver Lake was Good to Daddy on Father's Day

air temperature 65 degrees
water temperature 71 degrees
Fishing with a floating broken rapala and a 6 inch power worm on a Texas Rig.

I hit Silver Lake early with one of my fishing buddies Ty, who is a volunteer firefighter for Sussex Township.  It was an overcast morning that never warmed up.  We thought we were going to get rained on once or twice and the lake temperature was warmer than the air temperature.

I threw the Rapala for about 4 casts and still got some weeds.  I switched poles and on my second cast I got young largemouth.  There would be no putting the Texas rig down at this point.  Overall, the lake had a lot of vegetation and a lot of rocks.  My Eagle 360c depth finder was picking up a fairly rocky\sandy bottom as well as some big rocks in 6 to 9 feet of water.  Silver Lake never got any deeper than 10 feet but she was beautiful!  Although section (D) was very overgrown with small lily pads, I caught my second bass in section (D)!

I worked my way back to the other side and Section (C) was as sweet as I thought it would be.  In section (C) there is a rock about 15 feet from shore where there is another rock; this little bit of structure will most likely produce a fish every time, it really is that nice of a spot.

Ty finally hooked up a pickerel as we were heading back in and he gave the fish a nice sportsman release, although he did get his hands on it.  By the end of the day, all three of my largemouth bass were about the same size and there were two strikes that I missed.  I am sure there are some 5-pounders in Silver Lake, but I'll have to come back for them on another day.  However, I may have to bring a new worm as today's worm got beaten up.