Went out in the afternoon to look for fish for upcoming guests. We moved them to Monday and Tuesday due to the erratic winds this weekend (they are new to boats and fishing).
There are good numbers of fish north of Kelley's but the nets are still out there and nets and downriggers don't mix. So I started looking/watching the Solix as I headed South East toward Cedar Point. Marks here and there until I found a nice pod over some contour changes, not significant so it could be a coincidence. It was a large school over 40 ft of water.
We set up 3 Bandits on boards 115, 105, and 95. And Scorpion spoons on the riggers 25 to 35 down. The verry first board going out did not get half way out before it stopped and headed back with a solid 22 incher. We fished this pod for 2 hours and I don't think we had 6 rods working at any time. Sizes ranged from 27 to 6 inches, but mostly solid keepers. We released the little guys of course but also 3 fish over 25. We kept 12, 20 inchers for a fish fry. We had 2 other heavy hook ups that pulled coming in. No trash, yooo hooo.
Best Bandit color was Catacomb by far, it caught non stop. We ended up running two of them. No other color produced much but we didn't have time to try many. Notably Sunspot which has been good, did not take a fish. We only ran Nascar and Chicken Wing Scorpion spoons on the Riggers, both caught non stop. As expected the Bandits caught the bigger fish but the spoons consistently caught keepers also. Speed was 2.2 to 2.8 and didn't seem to matter. Water temps were in the low 70s.
We did have to dodge a thunderstorm, thanks to radar we could work around it.
