Who's Fishing Hopatcong?

[Bruce Litton]

We only got panfish, a pickerel, a 16 1/2 inch hybrid, and walleye just barely keeper sized this morning. What walleye weather! Or was it just too mild? Oxygen is down into 33 foot depths, at least, tested with live herring. My graph unit is on the blink, but I bet I would have marked fish at least 35 feet deep. Does anyone do real well with Binsky's & vertical jigging? I've caught fish this way, but never to the numbers we sometimes have scored with live herring. Putting multiple lines out with herring & managing this is harder to do, but seems, sometimes, to pay off better. The latest craze is chicken liver and some people are chumming hybrids with cat food. Neither is for me. I like using herring, but have to say I like fishing a bladebait better. But I want to catch more on them than I have as yet. I think the bladebaits fish better by bullet casts and lift/drop retrieves right on bottom. Quality braid is essential for feel. Some of the drop-offs are sunken ridge-lines and with the electric you can shimmy right along over them, casting as you go. Wind is certainly a factor, though.

[bunker dunker]

it is a great lake vertical jigging.give it another couple of weeks and the bait will start to stack on the points and humps.once that happens its jigging time.

[Skunk City]

I think with the cooler summer we had, there won't be a true "turnover" like in years past, but this time of year is usually a transition period and the fish can be scattered and suspended throughout. I was out last week and had a mixed bag of Hybrid/Walleye/Crappies. Should be better the cooler it gets.

[jimmythegreek]

there was no thermocline this year, just a hint of low oxygen when the water was above 80 for a few weeks in 35feet plus. I fished herring pinned to the bottom all summer and downlined, most of my 7lb+ wipers came in 30fow and deeper. Herring are a pelagic fish and they roam suspended in open water, u can slow troll them right smack in the middle in summer and come up with wipers and eyes, I do it all the time lol

[Capt. Lou]

My neighbor loves Walleyes,so he's on the LK now for a few days. I usually go with him later in season when jigging really takes hold. See how he does last week i believe he & his brother both placed in a tornament on the LK.
I think they caugth 8 eteyballs & other species.
Once water turns over jiging shpuld pick up ,I love that in late fall.

[Bruce Litton]

We plan to go out on the 11th & then on the 26th, and reading all these posts, I'm getting the idea that the jigging might be better on the 26th. You never really know; I know that, but if the herring tighten up on points and humps, that's a definite difference for sure. I've seen the hybrids bust herring at the surface way out in the main lake in July, sounded like horses hooves on cobblestones. They did seem vaguely related to a point; they weren't dead middle, but I could be wrong--my son and I marked a huge school once in October way down near the bottom in the middle between Boneparte Point and Halsey Island. Walleyes seem more like ambush predators; hybrids school in larger numbers and seem to roam more freely. It's all fascinating stuff for sure.