The Spoonpluggers Forum

But that’s my point. They don’t leave the lake. We are just not fishing at the right spot at the right depth & speed. They are there

So no one has been catching them during the summer months...at all. With "tons" of bass in the lake. Hmm..
Everyone just fishes March/April. Obviously the fish don't leave the lake, only those trying to catch them leave. I've tried summertime, have not been able to get any. People reading this can draw your own concussions on the bass fishery. I have not seen or heard of any good summer catches. Many other cooling lakes have great summer movements. Yes, it comes to depth and speed control, more than likely not fishing deep and fast enough.
Again my point is this is not a GREAT all around bass lake. i would LOVE it to be so I would not have to drove 3+ hours every weekend!

Ok the lake stinks no one go there

Hell NO!

"This lake is loaded with bass. Tons of them. Big schools of them"
But you can only catch them in March & April!

We have our first outing for 2021!
Braidwood outing
June 11th to 13th, 2021

Good luck that’s a shitty lake to fish in June

CHAMP wrote: ↑Wed Sep 30, 2020 8:55 am To say braidwood lake is not a good bass lake is truly an under statement!

An estimated 9,382 hours of angling effort was expended by tournament bass fishermen in 2019 which resulted in a total of 1,326 bass being weighed in. Tournament catch averaged 47.3 bass per event. The average size for the “biggest” bass in these tournaments was 4 pounds 8 ounces.
REALLY SUCKS!

Not sure where this info came from but it’s a little miss leading. This lake has a 1 fish per day limit. So most tourneys are only allowed to weight 1 fish per angler. They do have a tournament permit for some that allow 3 bas per boat to be weighed. So these numbers are not from a typical 5 man limit tournament. I’m not trying to say this places is Kentucky lake or anything but it’s definitely has a healthy population of bass for northern Illinois.

This is where I got the info.

site admin wrote: ↑Thu Oct 01, 2020 1:18 pm My point is after March/April.. I don't see anyone catching them. If there are BIG schools, they would be caught.
Show me schools of bass being caught in summer months and beyond....

This is the dumbest argument ever. There are pictures of boats loads of bass in March and April. 100 bass days reported. People camp out to fish the fishing is so good. 40,000 bass stocked a year, the lake is loaded .If you’re not catching bass you’re doing something wrong.
Heidecke has big schools of walleye but we don’t catch them after July so I guess that lake doesn’t have walleye either?

Ok sorry didn't mean to start any argument. But I can relate to what you both are saying. Santee Cooper lakes are like this. Lots of tournaments in early season and bags of big bass weighed . But after the spawn it gets tuff . Once the spawn is over you can go there and have 160 thousand acres of water almost to your self. But all those big ole bass didn't leave the lake!

Anyone who spends a lot of time on the water and fishes many bodies of water knows that every lake is different. Years ago I always said that if a person has never gotten into a school of bass on the cast ,using spoonplugs, he really has not reached the ultimate goal. A conversation with O'malley a couple days ago, we discussed some of the lakes we both used to fish. Terry told me on Palmer, he once made 17 casts in a row with 17 landed with fish from 4 to 6 3/4lbs. On the lakes that were set up to do this and had the fish, this happened pretty often for us also. I started telling Terry about how things have changed and after all of this, he asked me a question. When I am teaching a student, how do you explain this to him? Still, this is our goal no matter what we have to deal with. If we are confined to jump type lures, we already know we are limited to how many can be caught. And if the lake we are fishing has been sprayed to death for a few years, the minute we launch our boat, we should know that the amount of adult fish that used to swim in these waters are not going to be there.
I have my favorites but in order to find the good ones, we need to fish them all. A spoonplugger will know after fishing a lake a few times under stable conditions if something is wrong with the population. We troll and we cast. We use structure , breaks and breaklines to guide us in our fishing. We have more proven knowledge available to us than any group of fishermen out there. We deal with the conditions we are faced with and eventually decide to stick with a lake or find another. For most of us, once we have a lake in our hip pocket, it's time to move on. John

CHAMP wrote: ↑Fri Oct 02, 2020 2:55 pm Ok sorry didn't mean to start any argument. But I can relate to what you both are saying. Santee Cooper lakes are like this. Lots of tournaments in early season and bags of big bass weighed . But after the spawn it gets tuff . Once the spawn is over you can go there and have 160 thousand acres of water almost to your self. But all those big ole bass didn't leave the lake!

Interesting to hear that about santee copper.., I just assumed that place was a bass factory 365 days a year. I can’t fathom 160 thousand acres