Jigging sucked, but the trolling bite was on!

We started out jigging in the lower D-River, but after 90 mins of nothing, we put the jigging rods away and went to the lake. We found some dirty water in shallow that was 40 degrees (vs 37 in most of the surrounding area) and we decided to set up there.

I had a pull-back as I was setting my second rod (before it even got out all the way to the side) and that was 6+ lb fish. By the time we got that out of the net and the rest of the lines out, we were mostly out of the stained water, and the marks were gone. So we pulled everything in and went for another pass. Only this time, I went in even shallower to set up (which turned out to be a mistake). We set lines and went the whole pass without a bite. As we pulled in lines, we found out that every bait had crap on the hooks. That all happened as we were setting lines in the shallow water, so we never had a chance to catch them on that pass.

The next pass, I decided to not run in as shallow, however, I changed the angle so we could stay in the stained water longer. After 4 straight "drive-bys", we finally had one stay on and as we were fighting it, I slowed the boat down to .9 - 1.0 mph. Shortly after doing that, another board went back and as we were fighting both fish, a 3rd board went back. We got those fish in and as I was putting one of the rods back out, it got hit again. We just got that one in the boat, when my other board went back. So we went from 1 in the boat, to 6 in the boat, in about 20 mins.

The hot baits were Halloween, Psycho Killer, Smokeshow Shad and Fermi-Nuff. The first 4 fish came on baits with orange in them, so I almost pulled "Fermi-Nuff" for something else. Glad I didn't, because it ended up catching the last 3 fish.

This picture shows the chaos from that one pass. Gotta love it when you have fish flopping everywhere like that. Had we not wasted part of our time fishing, or that one empty pass, we would have easily caught our limit. We caught 8 in 4 short passes and one pass was wasted with crap on all of our baits. One more pass would have done it, for sure.

BTW, we were fishing in 11-13 FOW, fishing 15-25 back from the boards.

Attachment 7685

Nice job!

Where were you fishing? That's pretty shallow...

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Originally Posted by 350Industrial

Nice job!

Where were you fishing? That's pretty shallow...

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We were in MI waters, between Fermi and the D-River mouth. Look for the stained water. Don't be afraid to fish really shallow this time of the year. Especially if the wind is pushing warmer water up against shore. Yesterday the wind was more off-shore, but it had been on-shore the day before. I have seen huge fish up in 6 or 7 feet of water chasing bait fish in the spring. Look for stained water, diving birds, where wind might be pushing water into, etc. But when they are that shallow, we normally run our boards way out from the boat (100-200 feet) and then either run shallow divers or run them very close to the boards.