Trolling 6/4/26

[gb1234]

We were going to go out of Lorain but then I saw that Juls did well north of Kelly's yesterday. So we went out of Mazurik before sunrise and headed north, up the east side of Kelly's.

But my Humminbird wouldn't power up. I didn't want to run into Kelly's Island Shoal, so we stopped well south of it and put lines in the water, using Juls' specs from Wednesday. We had Bandits - including a pink and yellow one - that we ran unassisted between 67 and 97 back. And we had spoons on Tru-trip divers at 33 and 41. At least the Minn Kota would tell me my speed, which I set at 2.4 mph s.o.g.

There was a big pack of boats to our north but I wasn't going up there without knowing my depth. So we just trolled midway up Kelly's while I looked at the wiring. Eventually I found that a ground wire inside the breaker box had come off its connector. I plugged it in and everything came back on. We trolled our way toward the pack. I counted 106 boats in the general area.

We were in about 44' of water and marked small fish regularly - nice big ones on occasion. We started catching once we got up due east of the Shoal.

However, they weren't exactly jumping in the boat. And the bugs were bad. For a while, a breeze provided some relief, and we were preoccupied with catching the occasional walleye. But then it became very still. The bite shut down. The bugs were unbearable. The sun was baking us. I think we had 8 out of our 18 in the box at 11AM but we were ready to call it a day.

We didn't. We tried several colors of cranks and spoons, several depths, speeds between 2.1 and 2.8, trolling in every direction. Most of what we tried caught at least one but they were far and few between. A blue and chrome reef runner was our star, catching 5 or 6.

Eventually we replaced the spoons with crawler harnesses. I put on a 4oz weight at 30 and then went another 30-60 after that. We caught a few more, but it was a slog.

We had been heading SSE for a long time. By 2PM, we needed 5 more walleyes but we hadn't caught one in over an hour. There were only a few boats left out there by then. We decided to quit for real this time - but then we got one on a crawler. So we switched all lines to crawlers with that same program. The breeze returned, but it was now easterly. We started marking more fish. We were maybe 3 miles SE of K.I.S.

They really liked the crawler harnesses with 4oz weights there. In under an hour, we got our last 5, plus one lost on the way in, plus we caught a 19^th walleye when we pulled up to go home (which we tossed back of course). It was a great way to end a long day. Total count was 18 keepers, 1 short, 1 lost, 1 returned. Most of them were 19 to 21 inches. Plus we had two keeper cats.
Another banner day on the Lake.