By Colt Bass
There’s no use in telling a bunch of stories or lying about the fishing in January. It’s slow and there’s just not much you can do about that.
If you want a day full of reels screaming and multiple fish coming over the side of the boat the best thing you can do is stay at home and watch fishing on TV. But if you just can’t stand sitting at home there are a few things you can do to get a few striper to bite on Lake Hickory.
Because there is no hot hole or any kind of warm water discharge on Lake Hickory there’s no one particular area to focus on when it gets January cold.
The main thing I am going to focus on is locating schools of striper early in the day. I may troll bucktails for 2 hours or more in my winter time spots just locating schools. After I get a feel on what the fish are doing that particular day and have a few schools located I’m going to get over top of them and but out the live bait. This time of year I’m running all small baits. Shad and alewife anywhere from 2 inches to 3.5 inches are perfect for this time of year. I will always put out that one big shad in the 6-9 inch range in hopes for that monster, but 95 percent of my bites will be on the small stuff.
Now it’s just patience, like I said earlier it’s slow and these fish are very lethargic. All I’m going to try and do now is sit as still as I can and stay on top of the school. A good sonar unit comes in handy this time of year also. Because these fish are so lethargic, I’m trying to put this bait as close to them as I can. If I’m marking fish in 20ft. I want the bait in 20ft.
It’s not like spring or summer when the fish will chase a bait 3 to 10 feet up, you literally have to have it right in its face to get bites sometimes. I may sit on a school as long as 45 minutes to 1 hour with no bites before I decide to move on to another. A day of this, a lot of patience, and a little luck and you can make a decent day out of January. It will also make spring feel that much sweeter when it gets here,
January High Rock, Tuckertown, Badin Lake