Fishing with Jeff, Mark, and Rich...7/22/2025

[Capt Juls]

Fishing with Jeff, Rich, and Mark...7/22/2025

The weather on my back deck this morning was very nice. The air temp was 66 degrees, the sky was shining with stars, and the wind was light out of the northeast. My plan was to take my Wisco crew over to launch out of Vermilion this morning, due to the wind direction.

After making sure the dogs got fed, and had a little fun time with Momma...I left the house at 4:30. I parked my rig at the White Caps Motel, and scrolled through some social media while I waited for them. I was early, of course, so I wasn't going to text them to let them know how early I was. I had told them I would pick them up at 5:00 a.m., but I was there 25 minutes early. They walked out and found me at 4:45 anyway, so we hit the road.

The first stop was the gas station, as both the truck and the Vexus needed some gas, and the coolers needed some Ice. From there, we hit the highway and headed east.

We launched at 5:45 and were out of the river by 6:00am. I turned right and headed NNW, out of the river. The Garmin was marking fish for miles, but I was skeptical of what they were and figured they were probably White Perch and Sheephead for the most part....so, we kept going until we hit 44' of water, and the marks looked more walleye-like to me.

The FishHawk was deployed, along with the Ulterra and the baby Merc. Speed was set to 2.5mph (FishHawk speed), and the Vexus was pointed SSE.

The crew was shown how to run the dipsies, and how to set them. The Off Shore boards running cranks would have to wait, as the dipsies were going off one after the other. Unfortunately, they were mostly what I didn't want....White Perch and Sheephead. After enough pesky junk fish, I turned into the NNW rollers and headed towards the Sandbar. It was a good decision, because as we got deeper over 47-49' of water, the bites turned into keeper walleye.

We had their three-man limit by 10:00am, and then I worked on mine until we had 24 in the cooler. The Bandits behind the Off Shore boards only caught 2 or 3 fish (80 and 120 back unassisted), and the Flicker 11s on the other side caught a couple too (one at 140 back and one at 57 back), but that was it for cranks.

Everything else was on the BadMo, Yeck, and Scorpion spoons behind size 1 dipsies with rings.
Dipsies on the zero setting at 60-65 and the three setting at 97-105 were best.
Oranges, greens, purples, blues, whites...it didn't matter the color.

The currents are wacky over there right now, and they flow like ribbons under water, so keeping a close eye on the FishHawk's speed helped us tremendously, I think.

My guys did a great job setting dipsies, retrieving fish, netting fish, and having an all-around good time. The weather was perfect, the bugs were minimal, and the fish cooperated. You can't ask for anything more than that!

Tomorrow, I'll be launching out of Mazurik's with a local crew, due to the wind forecast (should be relatively calm tomorrow), and will head out east of Kelly's to find some more fish.

Stay tuned....

Capt Juls