The Spoonpluggers Forum

I know Buck never paid much attention to thermoclines.
My lake thermoclines sometime in the middle of June accoding to the folks who control the water flow.
The more experienced S/Ps should have some insight into this topic. I'm totally ignorant about thermoclines.
1. Do fish inhabit that area beneath the thermocline?
2. Would you go about your fishing and pay no mind to the thermocline?
3. Would you consider the thermocline a breakline and fish at or above it? This would be fishing for suspended fish and not a good practice.
4. I intend to go deeper than 35 ft this year for larger fish in the old river channel. Would a thermocline bother this plan?

Any help would be appreciated.....

Hi Pat, We have never really thought much about them. We figured that if they were very important that Mr. Perry would have included a section on it. There is less about thermoclines in the green book than live bait and I personally never go there either. If you do consider it, look at it as a breakline and if you would want to make a few trolling passes to check it out then go ahead and then get back to what you were doing. I would'nt spend much time even thinking about it. If there are deeper breaklines where you are fishing and you hav'nt caught the fish then just keep on going as deep as you can reach or as deep as you have confidence. John

John:
Thanks for the advice I wanted to hear. It's pretty much what I felt but it was good to hear it from an experienced S/P.

Pat,

I remember asking Terry O'Malley about this exact thing and said the same thing, "treat it as a breakline and go about your fishing in the same manor". He said take note of it but nothing changes.

I could be way out there somewhere on this one but I don't believe all thermoclines are created equally and I'm not about to figure out the difference but I read in lake map A gets a thermo at 24' in the summer but I didn't know about any such thermocline before we caught muskies at 34'......

Then I read that lake B gets a thermocline at 15' and we stumble upon fishing suspended muskies 12'-14' down in water as deep as 60' (river channel below) and catch 96 muskies in 3 weekends. What dose Buck say? Check it out!

I KNOW WHERE LAKE B IS!!!! HOSS