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I've never fished spoons on my own boat. Just cranks and then harnesses when the bite slows down mid season. What is the advisable size to use on the west end. Im fishing around fermi, Brest bay or more South/East if the waters not ridiculous rough. My boat stays in the water so I don't try other water very often. What size works the best basically? Gearing up for the coming months.
michigan stinger scorpion size and silver streak jr. size.
×2 what fishermen 2 recommended
We don't fish spoons until the water warms and trolling speeds get up to or above 1.5. Mostly when the big schools start moving east. We primarily work spoons east of Kellys.
We start off with the small stinger style spoons like the others suggested. We tend to catch smaller fish on these spoons and larger on the cranks, so we will run a mixed spread unless the fish tell us otherwise. There are times when the dinks will wear you out.
So as the fry and bait get bigger you can go to the larger spoons. Come late summer early fall we up size the same style spoons. We find this helps put more keeper size fish in the box.
Most guys in MI waters will use the smaller scorpion stingers as mentioned above. I think their size resembles emerald shiners, which is the predominant forage for walleyes in that area once the mayflies are done.
Like others have said, you need to troll pretty fast for spoons to be effective. In most situations you want to pull them between 2-3 mph, which means summer water temps.
That said, we catch lots of walleyes pulling larger spoons in the Central basin while fishing for steelies. We get tons of walleyes of all sizes on the medium sized spoons in that region. However, the fish are likely chasing rainbow smelt in the central basin, so the size of the forage is different. In that section of the lake, we typically use 4-5 inch spoons.
About 4-5yrs ago I bought a few spoon harnesses on Gale Force Tackle website.On a recommendation from fellow OGF guy.They make and paint their gear really well.They are also called worm burners.When got them,ran them against the scorpion spoons we ran.Found them to catch as well or better than the spoons and seamed to catch better fish too.I bought more and ran them more often the next season.Now we will start out with the spoon harnesses off our dipseys before out scorpion spoons.Now,I know a lot of people don't like the cost and mess of worms.But we originally had casted harnesses for 25yrs and then moved on to trolling harnesses when we first started to troll.So we feel using worms,just seams to catch better than strictly artificial.
I have done well on spoon harnesses as well. Haven't tried them in a few years though. I may have to break them out again. I have found that those work best around 1.7 - 2.2 mph.Quote:
Originally Posted by itsbob