SmackDown valley

[Chrisper4694]

wow! guess we picked the wrong place to fish yesterday! hahaha. nice job, get those pics up! photobucket.com

[ScowardNJ]

Sick report...It was our first time ever on RV all we ended up with was a stick full of old fishing line...haha

[Chrisper4694]

guess you should've mugged him!

[The Birdman]

Good seeing you and J- you are are the RV Lake trout PROS! Lol
Nice report, bring them over to Bardis, lets fry them up !

[gnuisance]

So are there big lakers in there or not? Everyone talks about these 35" fish that live in there but I've never seen them and you guys just caught 30+ fish with nothing over 24". Kind of makes you wonder......

[jrock]

Im sure there are some 34+ fish in there. For the most part we caught fish in the 18-22 inch range. Years ago there was def. a lot more bigger fish in the valley, but since they implemented the 6 fish creel limit my personal experience shows that the fish are getting bigger on the average. Before the new limit was set the place was infested with 12-15 inch stunted lake trout. Now I understand there is also a baitfish issue they are dealing with in the valley also so how effective the new regulations will be remains to be seen. But again every once in a while someone pulls out a trophy so I know there are some in there. If you look at the round valley page on facebook you will see a few months ago a guy pulled a 12+ pounder out of the valley.

[jimmythegreek]

there is still a huge problem w baitfish in the valley, the predominent bait is now shiners, the lakers wiped out the herring in no time, they are heavy hunters. From what I hear they actually want you to keep fish to take the pressure off the baitfish as the lakers naturally reproduce in there now so the other trout species are having issues as they arent as aggressive as lakers. If you look at the state's reports, there are some monsters in there......they gill netted a state record female 2 years ago while collecting eggs and they have pulled many big fish, including a pair of hybrid stripers that they kept and didnt go back in. The place can be tough because the lakers are bottom huggers and its a huge reservoir, you can troll all day without marking a single fish or bait but somehow you usually catch something but never actually see them. There are areas that seem to hold the lakers consistently as shown by Jrock and Red having a killer day with others getting nothing or little. Its a good place to learn to use your sonar and key in on bottom and your graphs settings

[Delawareriver]

Originally Posted by gnuisance

So are there big lakers in there or not? Everyone talks about these 35" fish that live in there but I've never seen them and you guys just caught 30+ fish with nothing over 24". Kind of makes you wonder......

I saw on fb there was a 17lber caugt last summer, and if I remember right a 14lber not long after that. Saw a guy hook on a tip up last winter that he fought for 15-20 mins not gaining much line before popping the hook. Definitely a few big fish in there but it's a big deep lake that can be challenging to fish, yet it's not a huge lake, just about every part of the lake is fished on a nice late spring early summer weekend so the fish have seen lures before and can be pretty picky. 30 fish sample size is nothing, you might have to catch a 1000 lakers before finding one of them over 10lbs in that lake. Plenty of those 18-22" fish tho which I keep every single one as they are pretty tasty smoked and definitely only helping the lake

[waynedane]

A guy in our club rvta, got an 18lbr last summer so there are some bigguns down there. The club has been stocking somewhere in the area of 300,000 shiners per year for a few years and the avg size has grown at least in the tournaments. I've only been going there a couple years and they're pretty easy to catch.