Mob Ruled the Day

Reports told of stripers smashing Spooks a couple of mornings ago, so given a forecast of a dark drizzly day, we anticipated a day of surface action and began the morning with a Super Spook, Super Spook Jr. or Bomber Badonk-A-Donk on every line. As hard as we tried, though, we could not coax the Illinois River's stripers to come up. However, when Lawrence Taylor decided to go down after the fish with a YUMBrella Flash Mob Jr., his school of flashy blades and swimming grubs proved more than the stripers could resist. I didn't take long for all of us to rig similarly and tap into the striper action. Spooks produced one largemouth and one small striper, but the Flash Mob Junior rigs yielded the best action by far.

Interestingly, a full-size Flash Mob didn't draw a single strike, and apparently a Super Spook Jr. was far more productive than a Super Spook over the weekend. The shad, which were very abundant in the area where we caught the fish, were quite small and the stripers seemingly didn't trust offerings with larger profiles.