Fishing for wipers with live bait

It's been 8 days since I've gone fishing - yard work and family obligations trump free time shenanigans - so I decided to hit the Lake Monroe tailwaters again this morning.  It's been hot (80+ degrees) lately, so I didn't know what that was going to do to the wiper bite.  There was only one way to find out...

I started out by casting around with my Zoom Super Fluke/jig head combo from last time.  On my third cast through the steadily drizzling rain, something hit my rig hard and started peeling line.  I had my drag set tight, but it wasn't stopping this water donkey.  The fish fought like a wiper, and sure enough, I could see that's what I was dealing with the first time it surfaced.  After a fun fight, I got the fish near shore and managed to get my net around half of it (I need a bigger net!), and it's a good thing I did.  My line snapped basically as soon as I netted the fish, and I surely would have lost it and my lure like I did with the walleye a few weeks ago if I didn't have a landing net.

This fish was my personal best wiper, weighing in at 8 lb 1 oz.  You wouldn't think that an extra pound worth of fish would make it fight so much harder, but I guess that's more than a 10% increase in size.  If you added that much muscle to me, I'd be on the Brute Squad too.

Anyway, as you can tell from the picture above, I ended up catching another 8-lb wiper.  That one took some work though.

I jigged around with my soft plastic for a while but I wasn't getting any bites.  Actually, I kept snagging some busted fishing line on the bottom of the creek, so it's probably no wonder that I was catching any fish.  After I got bored with that, I decided to dip into my tackle box and try some other lures.  I had a lipless rattling crankbait on top, so that's where I started.  I cast it through the current a few times and eventually felt something small take it.  I reeled in a foul-hooked gizzard shad:

I was just about to throw him back when my old man brain finally realized the obvious.  I've been catching wipers on shad imitations, so why not try to catch a wiper on an actual shad?  I quickly tied a 1/8 oz jig head onto my line, nose-hooked the shad, and tossed it into the spillway current.  Almost immediately, a huge silver shape hit it and left me with an empty hook.  That was fun to see, but it would have been more fun to catch that water donkey.

I tied my crankbait back onto my medium action rod and added a silvery spoon to my ultralight and went shad fishing.  I managed to hook two more (one on each lure) and then rigged up my jig head again.  After nose-hooking the first of these shad, history repeated itself: cast, water donkey attack, empty hook.  Now, I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but even I could tell that this a good way to feed wipers but a poor way to catch them.  So, I took a different approach with my last shad and hooked it through the back.

I cast my bait into the back corner of the spillway, and mid-retrieve, a big fish hit it!  Not only that, but it felt like I'd hooked it good too, which was necessary because this guy was right in the thick of the current.  I eventually fought it into slack water and managed to coax it toward shore while it zig-zagged back and forth to try to get rid of me.  I managed to land him though, and ended up with my second personal best of the day: 8 lb 4 oz!

I had my limit on the stringer but was having so much fun that I went about trying to catch another shad.  I snagged one on my spoon, transferred it to my jig head and hit the raging water again.  This time though, the shad either came off or was snatched off.  When I reeled my line back in, I noticed that my hook was bent, and I decided to call it a day.  I'll definitely try fishing for wipers with live bait again.  I wonder if they'd go for a bluegill...