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Fishing Day 1with Dan Pierce and Rocky Sofolo 5/28/2020
This was probably one of the first mornings, where I got ready to leave the house and never checked the weather. I thought it was supposed to be like yesterday, so I never bothered. Luckily, I always take my rain gear on the boat, because we needed it this morning.
There were little sprinkles of water on the windshield of the old Excursion as I drove to town this morning, so I looked at my RadarScope app to see what was up. There was a big blob of green and yellow moving across the radar screen, and headed directly towards this part of the lake....sigh.
I hate it when the boat gets all wet. Yes, yes, I know..."They sit in water, so are meant to get wet." I just don't like everything inside the boat to be all wet. It messes with my anality (I think I just made up that word) of keeping the boat clean. lol
We were waiting at Mazurik's for about a 1/2 hour, to let the dark gray sky lighten up some, and let the gusty winds die a little. The wind was out of the SE with gusts to 20mph this morning. The air temp was in the mid 50's.
At 6am we launched and headed east out of the ramp. Waves were 2 feet or less in Sandusky Bay and east of Marblehead, so it was an easy ride. I watched the Helix as we traveled across the open water looking for a telltale sign of aquatic life down below. Once she started marking fish, (which look like little red dots on my screen), I would lay down a waypoint, if I marked a bunch... then, kept traveling east along a contour line to see how far I could mark them. Once I ran out of fish, I turned the boat and deployed the Ulterra and baby ETEC. The trolling motor steered the boat with the auto-pilot function, and in conjunction with the 15 kicker, they pushed the boat along at a speed of 1.7-1.9mph.
**I find, when trolling with the waves, that keeping a back corner of my Ranger pointed at the oncoming waves is easier to keep a set speed, if one is needed.
Dan and Rocky have never used Off Shore boards before, so they hired me to show them how to troll with them. They were fast learners and made my job easy today! We caught our three person limit on Bandits again. Chrome Barbie (JTC color), Glare (Stock color), that new one I don't know the name of and can't find online. (I only know it's a JT Custom color that I bought at the Wharf), Attention Deficit (Domka Color), and RC Crush (DJs Custom Eye Lures).
If I think of it, tomorrow, I'll take a pic of that JT color, when we're in the boat.
We also ran a couple shallow running cranks on the dipsies....nothing to report there. They did nothing.
At one point of the morning...my Humminbird's both shut down and I couldn't figure out why it happened. Rocky, however, is an electrician and said it was a power problem.
I said, "I know the batteries were all charged before I left the house, so I don't understand".
At first, I thought it was just the back unit going bonkers, but when I saw that the dash unit had turned off too, I started to panic a little, because that would mean the starting battery was bad. I immediately when to fire up the big motor to make sure it had juice to start. It didn't. Aaarrrgggh....noooooo!
Then, I went to the main power switch to switch the lever, so I could jump the big motor.
Then, I saw it, I had the switch in the wrong spot. I had it on 2 instead of 1, so it wasn't getting the power it needed to run everything. Once I switched it back to position 1, everything worked again. Whew! Crisis averted. With a sigh of relief, we went back to fishing. :)
It wasn't a crazy fast bite, but it was fast enough to keep us in that area. We had a good time, and will be going out to repeat the experience tomorrow. We are meeting at Mazurik's at 5:15.
Stay tuned....
Capt Juls
