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Fishing with the Schneider Family 3/29/16
It's hard to get up early, and then have to wait half a day to get on the water. The northwest winds were blowing hard this morning, but the forecast promised that it would lay down towards noon. I had originally set up a 9:30 pick up at their hotel, but changed it to a 10:30 pick up, so we could launch at 11am.
Today, I would be fishing with Jim Schneider, along with his two son, Jimmy, and Jimmy's friend, Trevor.
I met up with Capt Kevin Swartz, who was also picking his crew up later in the morning, and we discussed our plan of attack for the day. After getting a message from Al Cassidy, who was already on the water, that said, "Stay home! It's dirty everywhere", we almost cancelled, but thought we should talk to our crews and let them decide if they wanted to still go out and try it. Both parties did, so off to Mazurik's we went. We ended up waiting for the lake to lay down a little more, and launched at 11:45.
We headed to the area over by the monument on South Bass Island first, but didn't stick around there long, because we weren't marking enough fish there to keep us there.
Then, we moved over to the SW corner of South Bass, and looked at the water...it was a lot dirtier to the west of the islands, so I told Kevin, "I'm going to Kelly's, the water is cleaner over there, and there were fish there the other day". He said, "Okay, that sounds like a good idea", and drove over there too.
I set in a little further northeast of where Kevin sat down on the NW corner of Kelly's, and set lines. The Schneider boys were inexperienced with Off Shore inline planer boards, but after a quick lesson, they were setting lines like they have been doing it for a long time. So, all I had to do was tell them how far back I wanted them to set them out. We ran Bandits on one side of the boat and Deep Husky Jerks on the other side of the boat.
It wasn't long before we had a walleye hit a Fire Tiger Bandit, set at 45 back. Then, we caught another one on a Bandit relatively quick, so we took the Huskies off and put all Bandits out. Blue/Chrome, Black Headed Wonder Bread, Fire Tiger, and a Purple/Chrome Bandit took our only four fish this afternoon. We had a 5th fish on after a long period of no bites, but it came unhooked at the back the boat. Poor Trevor was very disappointed....but hey, that's fishing. Sometimes the fish wins the battle. :)
It was a struggle, and we changed things up quite often, but they were just in a negative mood...contrary to the marks on the Helix that would make one think those fish were really active down there.
I kept getting texts and phone calls from anglers on the west side of the islands who were talking about the tough bite over there too. So, it wasn't just us.
My crew had a 5 hour drive back to MI, and the late start didn't help that, so since the bite was not very good today, we decided it was best to cut the trip down to 5 hours instead of the regular 6 hours, so they could get on the road.
My crew said they had a good time and learned a lot. They were in awe of the size of the fish here, so their excitement made me happy. :)
My Wednesday, Thursday, Friday crew have cancelled due to the less than nice forecast, and my weekend trips might be shot too, but I'm not calling those yet.
So stay tuned....
Capt Juls
