Fishing with Sam 5/1/2014

[Capt Juls]

Launched from Mazurik's at 6:30am this morning with Sam, my lone customer.
We were the first boat out from that ramp today. I wondered if everyone else knew something I didn't about the weather, but it turned out they were just sleeping in.


Sam and I headed to the NW corner of Kelly's to start trolling. We put out two crawler harnesses and two DHJ12's to let the fish tell us what they wanted, and after two fish came on the Purple Glass at 47 back, we switched out one of the crawler harnesses for a second PG on that side of the boat. After a third fish came on the PG, we took the other crawler harness off the other side and tried another color DHJ. No other colors caught a fish.

It was strange. All the fish came on the starboard side of the boat today. We moved back up to make another pass through the area, but the winds were picking up and I decided it would be a better idea to move in towards the mainland and try to get into better water conditions.

We moved over to an area between Mazurik's and the Lighthouse and found water that was more dirty than out by Kelly's. We could see the cavitation plate, but the prop was just barely visible. I remembered the Deep Rattle'n Rogues in the storage compartment and thought that it would be better to have a lure out there that made some noise. After looking up the dive curve chart for it, we saw that it would need too much line out to get to the desired depth.

Then, I remembered seeing a video by Mark Romanack on using the OST Tadpoles as snap weights, so I pulled a number 2 Tadpole out and we set it 25 feet in front of the Rogue and then let it out to 60 and put the board on. Sam had picked the color and chose Firetiger. (I usually hate Firetiger, and didn't have a lot of confidence in it, but didn't say anything..lol)

Just as I was thinking that it was just not going to be our day, that Off Shore board went back with a good tug. "Fish On"! Woot! Woot! It was a nice fish too! Sam set that bait back out and I pulled in a DHJ from the other side and duplicated our set up, but instead of putting it 25' ahead of the bait, we put it 15' ahead of the bait. At one point we saw a pull back, but thought it got off....to make a long story short, we were pulling a little white bass around for a good hour. D'Oh! I got lazy and didn't check it, because I wasn't using crawlers. (Lesson learned!).

We finished out the day with 7 nice walleye.

Thanks Sam for a great time on the water! You were fun to fish with and I even learned a thing or two from our conversation today.

The weather conditions today were all over the place. Lots of wind out of the SW, Sun..then clouds..then Sun...then clouds..then drizzle...then Sun...then clouds...all day long! lol
Water temp was at 48 degrees and the air temp was maybe 50 degrees...waves were anywhere from 1- 2's...then 1-3's...2-4's...back to 1-3's...up and down all day...sigh.

Next charters are Saturday and Sunday if the weather allows. I'll keep ya posted.

[weekendwarrior]

Nice report ......I too have struggled this year with fish only hitting one color per day. Also reef runners have been out fishing huskey jerks this year as well

[wallenharms]

Nice report, glad to see you got into them.

[ReelTime]

Nice report Juls. Will be up fishing Sat and Sun. Hope to see you out there.

Wes