Decided we needed to try and see if the fish are staging somewhere way south of Bismarck on Lake Oahe. We are seeing fish up in the river, but we just haven’t seen a huge push of fish quite yet. So we hooked up the boat and truck and headed for the North Dakota/South Dakota border.

Upon arrival, I noticed the water has dropped considerably since the Casino Cup in September.  One thing I will say no matter how high the water is, when it drops, it tends to put the fish in a tizzy.  Lake Oahe is a vast complex system, some folks forget the water is moving and there is current.

I decided to try and go to some very high percentage areas to track the fish down and it didn’t take long at all to connect. In previous reports, I’ve talked about how healthy the fish look and also that we are seeing lots of forage. I can tell you this much, its the same story down on Oahe as we are finding up in our river near Bismarck. The fish look awesome and we saw numerous pods of baitfish on our Lowrance electronics.

We didn’t do anything fancy. We tied on 3/8 oz and 1/2 oz Lindy jigs with the biggest minnows we could scoop out of the bucket and slipped the edges of the river channel in 28 to 35 foot of water. We boated some really nice fish! The current speed was a perfect 0.7 mph so it made for a wonderful easy drift! I have to throw a little sales pitch in. I’m using all JT custom rods these days. After I put the first 3 or 4 fish in the boat it didn’t take the guys in my boat long to try one. By the end of the day, the whole boat had JT rods in hand. These rods are unreal and they are a game changer for sure. If anyone is interested in trying one before you buy, please get in touch with me mikepelusooutdoors@gmail.com I can also help you purchase these rods. I’m telling you it’s a huge advantage!