Norfork Lake Fishing Report

The weather on Norfork Lake has been great. Daytime temperatures have been in the upper 60's to 70's and the evenings have been in the 40's & 50's. I couldn't ask for a better fall. The fish in Norfork Lake are starting to move to their winter patterns. Basically this is saying you can find fish both shallow and deep and anywhere in between. This morning I fished with one of our guests (Grant) and we ended up catching largemouth, smallmouth and spotted bass. We started throwing a Zara spook at sunrise at the end of docks, with no success. I headed into the bank and on the first cast this nice 16 inch spotted bass hammered my spook in less than one foot of water. We continued to work the shoreline for the next couple of hours and landed several bass. All received their freedom. Once the shallow bite stopped we moved to a semi deep bluff line and started working worms and a jig and pig on the bottom. I ended up landing a smallmouth. We started to vertical jig with a spoon, but the wind picked up and it became too hard to hold my location. We had a good morning and decided to head back home for that second cup of coffee.

Yesterday morning I found a large school of white bass pushing shad to the surface. We started throwing a spook, but they just would not hit them. I saw the school on my fish finder so we started to spoon and had a great time pulling in one after another, with plenty of misses. We were fishing back in the 6A area. We then headed to a point at the end of a bluff line and started to spoon. The bass didn't show up, but we did catch several crappie that were hanging around a sunken tree. One of these days I need to take my crappie gear to this location. The crappie were just stacked over the tree in 15 - 35 feet of water. In the other photo Grant landed this nice 22 inch walleye on a rogue type bait.

Stripers are starting to show up all over the lake. They have been caught in front of 101, in Panther Creek, Float Creek and up from Cranfield. I have not found any top water action yet, but hopefully this will happen soon. Fish are being caught on live bait, from 20 - 50 feet down. Hopefully I will get out and do some serious striper fishing in the next day or so. My new shad tank arrived so I will be able to live bait fish along with the artificial bait.

Linda has been after me for some catfish. I guess I will set a trot line out before long and see what happens.

The Norfork Lake level is falling and currently sits at 559.5. The surface water temperature was 66.5 degrees this morning and should drop over the next week. The main lake is clear and the creeks and coves are starting to clear. The Corps is running one or two generators sporadically during the day.

Happy fishing and see you on the lake.