I left early, so I could go gas up and get ice for the cooler, before picking my crew up from the White Caps Motel at 5:20. They were ready to go when I arrived a few minutes early, so we headed out. I told them my plans, and why, and they liked the idea, so off to Vermilion we went.
We arrived at the launch just as it was getting light out, and there were already several boats there launching, or getting ready to launch. We headed out of the river at 6am, and headed west from there. We didn’t go very far before marking some good fish on the Helix, so we stopped to set up. The Terrova and the baby Merc were deployed, and set to a westerly course.
Speed was surging, due to the NE rollers happening, but I was trying to keep the lure speed at 1.3-1.5 on the Fish Hawk, while the GPS speed was reading 1.8-2.1 at the same time.
Water temp was 46.7 this morning.
We set up with all Bandits behind Off Shore boards, on both sides of the boat, for the first pass. 80, 60, 50, 40 on the port side, and 85, 65, 55, 45 on the starboard side (Longest leads on the outside).
Colors were Khaki, Red Headed Wonder Bread, Buck Fever, and RC Crush on the port side, and Black Headed Wonder Bread, RC Crush, a Hammertime color I don’t know the name of, (not on his site, but was picture in my last report), and Huff Daddy on the starboard side.
We went with the waves, over 25-27 feet of water first, and marked a ton of fish, but only got one small male to bite. Ugh…it was SO slow. It’s frustrating to see so many fish on the screen, when they just don’t want to eat.
I decided to run the trough from East to West, and out to deeper water. “Let’s change the angle of our dangle, and see what happens”, I said.
Fish were marking everywhere, but still hanging lower in the water column. I tried one perch colored Spro on a snap-weight, to get it down to them, but they weren’t interested, and not eating down there.
I switched up the inside Bandit on the port side to a Walleye Nation Creation Reaper in a color I bought from the “Fishing Addiction” website called, “Blue Chrome Zombie”. It was swimming at 40 back for about 10 minutes, before the board slammed back. That was a good sign. When it got hit again, I said, “Let’s change up the entire starboard side with Reapers, and see what happens. They may just want a different profile and action today. We’ll keep three Bandits on the other side, to see what they prefer.
Another BCZ went out, along with two Purple Tigers, and a Black Headed Wonder Bread. The outside board ran at 60 back, the third board at 50, the second board at 45, and the inside at 43. All the Reapers took fish this morning. A long story shorter….Eventually, the fish on the sonar started to rise off the bottom, and come up. Bandits caught three fish and the Reapers took 9 of the 12 fish we caught.
We had three pullbacks that didn’t hook up, too.
We went from 27′ out to 38 feet and turned back around to go west to east. We caught a couple going that way, but it was better going east to west.
It was comical to watch the three of us trying to stand up while running the trough with NE rollers…and, while I have damn good sea legs, I did lose my balance several times. My crew had a much harder time with it, but stayed positive and did a lot of laughing. Thankfully, no one fell or got hurt, so it was worth the effort, because the fish definitely liked that direction better. 🙂
Glen and Joe had a great time just being on the water today, so catching fish was a nice bonus, which makes my job a lot less stressful when the fish are giving me a hard time, but getting them their limit made me very happy.
Tomorrow’s trip has been rescheduled by my customer for later in May, so I’m off tomorrow. I’m still watching Saturday’s weather, and will decide that one tomorrow.
Stay tuned…
Capt Juls
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