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Posts: 2361
| The same story trumpeted again and again by fishing publications is that musky quit using weeds in the fall. Do they really?
Rabbits and mice still hide in a dead garden. True, it is not full of bugs and birds anymore, but look at your lawn and look at your froze out dead garden. Which offers COVER and PROTECTION. If you were forage in the area where would you hang out?
Does forage so totally abandon cover that they would take their chances out in open water before hiding in some dead or dying weeds? If that is so then one would surmise that panfish etc. only are in the weeds for the bug banquet it might provide. Not for protection. Is that the case?
I would tend to think that dead weeds provide both cover objects in clumps, and structure in the case of larger beds and that musky would stay tuned to them as long as they came up off the bottom.
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Posts: 2091
Location: Stevens Point, WI | I have seen and taken muskie's from weeds well into November, case in point two weeks ago I boated a 40" fish on Big Arbor Vitae that was in about 8 feet of water sitting very tight in the cabbage. I also moved at least six other fish grinding spinnerbaits through this relatively shallow cabbage. |
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Posts: 4266
| I think when the larger weeds are dying, they are actually sucking oxygen out of the water instead of producing it. At the same time, you can still fish the very outermost edge of the weedline and still come up with green, healthy coon tail until lack of light penetration makes it die off. The bait fish may not be using the area for cover, but they will sure be near the deeper weeds for the quality of water that is there. Those dying weeds will still hold food for baitfish, and where there's food, there's bigger members of the food chain present.
Beav |
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Posts: 32892
Location: Rhinelander, Wisconsin | I think the traditional idea came from those fishing cabbage, especially broadleaf. When that stuff browns up, it collapses in on itself, closing off the cover amd flattening out the weedbed, taking oxygen out of the water in that area as it decomposes. I do just fine on the deep edges that are still green, as Beav brought up. My favorite big walleye late pattern is deep green bay related east face weedlines/gravel pockets with creatures, and I've taken a number of muskies doing that. |
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Posts: 8789
| It's my understanding that dead dying weeds deprive the water of oxygen, unlike spring and summer, where the emerging weeds are producing oxygen. |
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Posts: 929
Location: Rhinelander. | I think beaver is right. There is a period I believe where muskies do stop using the weeds. The key is and from what other guides say is that after a certain amount of time passes they will go back to them>.........Pfeiff |
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Posts: 2361
| The question is though, do they REALLY stop using them, or is this just circular information that really has no basis in fact? Has anyone really gone into a weedbed and documented lower dissolved O2? And even if there is lower 02 in the weedbed, does it extend out around the weedbed? How far out? How big of a weedbed does it take to make a significant drop in 02? Lots of guys fish very small weedbeds, isolated from the larger beds, are those oxygen deficient too?
There must be some standard to apply "weedbeds go bad" theory, do they have to be huge flowing weedbeds, a 15 foot band, a 20 foot band etc? It just seems like weedbeds lose their attraction in the fall is a pretty broad and nondescript statement that really doesn't deal with what is probably a set of definable paramaters that could be explained much better.
Oxygen depletion really can't be a defining characteristic of shallow weedbeds on any kind of a windy day there should be more than enough circulation to keep them well oxygenated within the realms of fish comfort, and very similar to the waters around them.
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| No they don't stop using them if they are present. They will even cling to dying clumps if that is all that is left.
They need oxygenated water though, so at some point they need to transition for Winter staging. |
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Posts: 32892
Location: Rhinelander, Wisconsin | I wonder, though. I catch pike right after ice up in the bays in the mixed dead and green stuff, and pannies too. If those fish are there that late... |
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Posts: 929
Location: Rhinelander. | for a short period as the weeds go bad the fish I believe leave them as there are better weeds elsewhere on the lake. As the lake sabilizes for the winter (late fall) they will again use them as many others on that body of water are now in same condition.
When ice fishing we catch more fish off the green weeds then those that have died or are bad shape.
Get and underwater camera amd watch and look, what a great tool it has proved to be for me.
Pfeiff |
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