Help a newbie out?

[sherman51]

I'm pretty new to fishing and fishing up in this western lake erie region, and have been reading a lot from this forum, especially the fishing reports? Sometimes I feel like I'm reading a foreign language with the locations and descriptions of bait and lures and was wondering if anyone has a quick reference of locations people talk about on here (B can? C can? some of the reefs)? I think with the baits I can usually figure out what someone is talking about after I research it a bit, but would be curious if anyone has some general references for that as well. I appreciate all the great information on here and look forward to the reports every day while I'm at work wishing I was out fishing!

Thanks.

I started fishing the western basin around 1980 and it was easy to just drift with weight forward spinners 3/8 oz to 1/2 oz is all we needed. we used spinning gear and just let out line. then set our rods against the gunnal and drifted letting the boat do all the work. a few years later the water cleared from the zebra mussel and the fish numbers dropped, so we switched to trolling. we used Hot n Tots and Wigglewarts as our go to baits then. but we wasn't above using anything in our tackle box if things were slow. those cranks caught many limits for us. but now you have a wider choice, deep husky jerks, bandits, and many other cranks to choose from. but if I was going to troll I would try a few Hot n Tots and Wigglewarts. catching fish drifting is a lot more fun than trolling. I would get a few weight forward spinners 3/8 oz to 5/8 oz if I was going to try drifting.

we fished out of Cooly Canal and docked at Menekee Marina once we started docking our boat. but the 1st few years we used the public dock and parking lot to camp and left our boat tied to the bank. after coming out to the lake we normally went out past the intake about 3/4 of the way to west sister island and started drifting. some days we started trolling near the water intake and did great. but most of our fishing was just south of the island to the northwest of the island.

when we moved to the central basin we bought line counter reels. we didn't have a clue how to fish the deep water and had never seen a dipsy diver. so we went out on a charter that ran dipsies for 2 trips. the second day we was doing everything with the caption watching over us. then we could run 3 dipsies per side on my boat. we did make mistakes and had our share of tangles. but we caught fish while still learning. we gained more knowledge about fishing dipsies in those 2 days than we would have learned in years starting out blind.