The winds were light this morning at 2am, when the dogs and I went out on the back deck, and the air was relatively warm. The sky let a star poke through here and there, so I could tell it was partly cloudy.
As the dogs nibbled on their morning treats and I sipped my hot coffee, I checked iWindSurf’s wind forecast for the upcoming morning hours. It showed that it would still be light winds until around 10am, then pick up out of the SW. It would be getting gustier as the afternoon hours approached.
The trip today was with friends, because I couldn’t spend another day on shore, and needed to find some fish. When you don’t fish for a while, you wonder what’s happening out there. Sure, there are tons of reports of “We caught them in an hour and a half”, “Fast limits”, and pictures showing full fish boards…but, no info as to what they caught them on, or a general area, to help anyone.
With that said, it was time to get out there again…
Keith and Jeremy drove in from the Perrysburg area and met me at my house, since I was on their way in. They showed up at 5:45, got in the truck, and we headed to the gas station for some ice. The boat was already topped off with gas, so that didn’t have to be done.
When we arrived at Mazurik’s, the line was short, but it was starting to get busy behind us. I readied the boat, and we hit the water. After the 400 warmed up, we went east. My last time out was on the SE side of Kelly’s, and there were a lot of fish there….I was hoping there would be more migrating through there.
The Garmin marked a handful of fish, but it was nothing like last week.
We were by the Marblehead dump when I decided that we should just get some baits in the water and head north to deeper water. We started in 40′ and went NNE until we hit 44′. The marks were few to none most of the way.
We picked off a few fish here and there, and the screen was blank when they hit.
7 Bandits were running behind the Off Shore boards, and to make a long story short….the winning bait was once again “Khaki” (stock color) running at 100 and 115 back, unassisted. One was run on each outside board, and between the two of those, they took the most fish. More Khaki Bandits replaced unproductive colors and set out at 80 and 90 back. They took fish too.
“Electric Zebra” (stock color) caught one fish. But, it was khaki that they wanted most today.
The dipsies were running at the usual zero and three settings at 40 and 57, respectively. The zero setting was changed up a few times to run deeper and shallower, but never took a fish. The three setting at 57 took two nice walleye with a Yeck spoon.
We were running at 1.9-2.5mph, and catching at all speeds. As it got windier, the speed was up and down, due to waves, boat wakes, and boat direction.
The water temp on the surface was showing 52.7 degrees, while the FishHawk showed 54.2 degrees 18 feet down.
We ended after 4 hours, going 11 for 15, which was better than I thought we would do since we weren’t marking very many fish. Our trolling pass was from the SE corner of Kelly’s up to the NE corner (S side of the shoal), and then over to the north side of Kelly’s.
There were a lot of boats working the north side of Kelly’s, and that’s where we caught most of our fish. I think we had 5 in the cooler by the time we passed through the bottom of the shoal, and moved over to the north side of “North Bay”. Then it was just a matter of playing dodge the boats. Most seemed to know the “Rules of the Road”, so there were no issues….(whch isn’t usually the case). lol
Since Keith and Jeremy have fished with me before, they knew how to do everything, so it made my job easy this morning. I just had to control the boat speed, direction, watch for other boats, play DJ, and serve sandwiches. lol
It was a fun morning, and it felt good to get back on the water again. The time off allowed me to get the boat to showroom clean again, so it was nice fishing out of a “brand new” boat again. UPDATE NOTE: The iPilot problem I had last week with the Ulterra has been fixed with a software update, so all is well again. 🙂
Tomorrow, I’ll be taking my neighbor’s Dave and Danielle out for a few hours to celebrate Dave’s birthday. It’s supposed to be a gusty North wind in the early morning hours and then fading to less than 5mph as it switches to the NE.
The plan is to launch out of Catawba around 9:30 and head up to the west side of the Bass Islands to find some fish. Fingers crossed!
Stay tuned….
Capt Juls