Left Denver at 4am Thursday morning May 31 with a new fishing buddy to Lake Powell named Tim Harter, we made it to the Neskahi wash are about 6pm and setup camp and caught a few nice catfish and Stripers on chovies behind the boat in about 10ft of water that first night. Next morning we could see what appeared to be small slurps, but could not get close enough with the boat to see if they were stripers before they would go under.

Started fishing for small mouth bass with curly tails on jig heads and where catching a few, nothing to get real excited about. But we were fishing and the weather was beautiful and I was in the San Juan.

About 3pm we motored back west to the Piute canyon area of the bay and started seeing the slurps again, but this time I could see these pods of fish were stripers. Ok now it was time to try out the walleye assassins that Rich Sutterfield had told me about that worked so well on slurping stripers for him. So we tied on white headed 1/2oz jig heads and bit off about ?? inch of the top of the plastic nose of the WA and added the jig head. We would idle up to the striper slurps and throw across them and then reel back fast thru the middle of them and would get at lest a double hook up each time we did this.

Now about 5pm the whole bay area as far as the eye could see there were nothing but slurps/boils happening. There must have been at lest 50 to 100 stripers in each of these pods, that is a lot of stripers. The closer it got to sunset the more fish we would catch out of each of these pods of stripers. The most caught was 8 fish out one pod, and then we would only have to idle over about 50 yards to the next slurp/boil. The reason I say boil, is because we could see some of the fish make splashes instead of just ripples on the top of the water. These were the 18 inch healthy stripers. We also did catch some that were around 3lb range and some of these were also healthy fish, the rest not so healthy. The reason I say that is I had to clean all 50 + that night, I only had only one 12v filet knife.

That night after cleaning all those fish, I just put the cot up with the air mattress and slept under the stars on the boat. It was peaceful and calm all night. The full moon was bright. Next morning(Sat)got up(late) and did some small mouth fishing again. We caught about a dozen that were not dinks, caught a bunch of dinks. 3-5inches.

So about 3pm we started looking for the slurps/boils again, but only could find a few here and there. But at 5pm things started picking up again, and we started to repeat the same as the evening before. There was about 45 minutes of fishing light left and slurp/boils were all around the boat. Each time I thought I would need to start the motor and move 50 yards, there would be another slurp/boil heading right for us, we just wait until they got in casting range and repeat. That is how it ended, with another 60 + in the cooler. Good thing, I only had 5 walleye assassins left out of the 30 I bought with me.

That night I hung out the green light to see what would come into the light. I now could see all these tiny tiny shad in the water. There must be a lot of shad in that bay area to cause so many slurps/boils. Looks like shad will make a come back in the San Juan if the striper's don't eat them all before they grow up.