By: Jake Bussolini
When I moved to Lake Norman 20 years ago, I spent many months studying how things worked in a man-made lake. In the northern lakes where I spent most of my life fishing, the most important features of a particular lake or river were the various structures that held the fish day after day. My studies of Lake Norman told me to keep a sharp eye on the food sources for the fish which are normally the schools of shad and herring. Over the years I developed the habit of gluing my eye to my sonar screen to find the schools of bait and try to determine their behavior and movements. I even did some significant research in an attempt to try to understand how many fish these large bait schools contained. The photos below is a typical large school of shad.
I even did some simple mathematics to determine that this large school contained approximately 5000 shad. For several years it was normal to find two or three of these large schools in nearly every cove on the lake during the summer months. The behavior of these schools was also fairly predictable as the water temperature changed during the seasonal changes. The schools went into the deeper water as winter approached and moved back into the shallower waters as the water warmed.
This year has been different and from my experience there are far fewer of these large schools to be found, regardless of the water temperature. What has changed the behavior of the shad? Frankly I don’t know. Lake Norman has gone through some significant water temperature changes this year, but my records show that the same temperature changes have occurred in past years with no significant change in shad behavior. This year I have found that finding one of these large schools in a large cove is unusual and in many searches that I have made, there was not a shad to be seen.
We know that if the water gets below 45 degrees in the winter, many of the shad begin to die off, but this happens nearly every year in some areas of the lake. There is no reason to think that the shad spawn this summer was not normal but yet why the seemingly significant reduction in this food source?
I would like the input from other anglers on Lake Norman to get their experiences and opinions on this subject. Those anglers interested can e mail me at allandco@roadrunner.com with their opinion.
Jake Bussolini is a freelance writer, who has published several books about freshwater fishing. His books can be seen at www.booksbyjake.com.