Thumping with pool cue is captain’s secret weapon
Summer crowds are gone and Upstate lakes all but deserted, plus, the heat has broken and many outdoorsman and swapped out rods and reels for deer-hunting. Many anglers are enjoying the return to the peace and quiet of fishing without the rocking of boat wakes and can spend a day in solitude.
Then a rod goes down and the chaos is back! Although confined within the gunwales of his own boat, Capt. Bill Plumley of Capt Bill’s Fishing Adventures on Lake Hartwell said this is the kind of chaos he enjoys most. During the latter part of September, striped bass are still on their late summer pattern, but they show a tendency to move up in the water column as night-time temperatures begin to moderate.
Plumley targets these mixed schools of striped and hybrid bass by slowly motoring around the mouths of major tributaries near the dam. One minute the graph shows nothing but a deserted forest of submerged timber, and the next he has stumbled upon a jumbled mass of fish tearing into schools of shad and herring.
It’s a mad dash to get rods out around the boat, each line manned by a lively blueback herring and dropped next to the boat on a Carolina rig. As an incentive to garner some attention, Plumley employs a somewhat unusual but unarguably productive tactic of thumping on the bottom of the boat with an old pool cue.
In theory, the noise put vibrations in the water which excite the fish’s lateral lines and cause them to “look up” and investigate the area beneath the boat where they are greeted by Plumley’s baits.
It’s an exciting ride as Plumley and his son-in-law Matthew Melton, on leave from the U.S. Marine Corps after three tours overseas, do battle with some Lake Hartwell Late Summer stripers.
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