CTFishTalk.com: Housatonic River - Shelton 04/10 - Connecticut River Reports ( CT River Reports ) - A Community Built for Connecticut Fisherman.

PECo · Joined: 06 Oct 2009 Posts: 5203 Location: Avon, CT

TurtleKiss (aka Kira) and I fished the lower Housatonic River from the Sunnyside Boat Launch Facility in Shelton. When we arrived at Sunnyside, the crew was still there to continue preparing the parking lot for expansion. Luckily, they didn't restrict parking to only three trailers like they did yesterday, because we were the fifth to arrive. Rolling Eyes

We got on the water at 8:15 am. High tide was at 9:20 am and low tide at 4:08 pm. As the day went on, the air temperature quickly rose from the mid-40s to a high of 56 degrees. After a calm morning, the wind blew out of the south at a steady, unrelenting, 15 to 20 miles per hour, with gusts up to 30 miles per hour! Shocked

On the lower Housatonic River, a steady south wind is the worst possible wind. It made the murky water extremely choppy. The water temperature actually dropped a couple of degrees from the day before and ranged from only 43 to 45 degrees. Immediately after we launched in my boat, The Other Woman, Too, we tried to locate fish in the channel next to the ramp, but didn't find much. Here's Kira enjoying the calm before the storm:

We soon headed to the upriver side of Two Mile Island, where we saw three other boats and marked some fish on the fishfinder. Kira boated our first schoolie striper:

A short while later, I got my first, too:

Although we were able to locate sparse schools of fish with the finder, they didn't want to bite. We boated only eight of them before we decided to head downriver to check it out. Unfortunately, by that time, the south wind had risen and blown up a heck of a chop on the outgoing tide. We got only as far as Wooster Island, before the waves got to be too much:

We headed back to the upriver side of Two Mile Island to try and get alee of the wind. We took a long time to boat three more schoolies, before we finally gave up trying to fight the wind. We got off the water at 2:15 pm, after boating only 11 schoolie stripers.
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Michael · Joined: 28 Jan 2012 Posts: 3823 Location: Bridgeport

Today I fished Mondo Pond and on my way there from The Dock in Stratford, I saw white caps galore during the outgoing tide mid morning.