Fishing with Jeff and Mike 7/19/15

[Capt Juls]

Hey! I get to start this blog off differently tonight. Instead of my usual, "I picked my customers up at their hotel at...", I get to say, my customers sent me a text this morning at 5:05 that said, "We're out in front of the Best Western". As I blinked the sleep out of my eyes, I was washed over with the overwhelming feeling of failure. I let my guys down. I was LATE!!!

I had been dreaming, and the song that is my alarm was playing in the background of my dream. I was now wide awake at 5:05. It was two hours past my normal get up time, so my morning routine was now out the window.

Luckily, the boat was ready to go last night, and all I had to do was throw some clothes on, brush my teeth, and grab a few things off the counter.
I still managed to pick them up at 5:30, but I was out of sorts without my coffee and my routine. I didn't even have time to check the weather...sigh.

All I knew of the weather was that a big storm was headed this way out of Illinois, and along with it would be, big winds and damaging hail. It was expected in early afternoon. I knew I wouldn't have access to my phone app radar up in Canadian water, so I was a bit apprehensive of being so far from home if a monster storm was coming.

We stopped at Big Bopper's for breakfast, and was able to wake up a bit more. After breakfast, we hit Mazurik's and were launching by 7am. We headed up to the "Wagon Wheel" on the west side of Pelee Island, and made a pass through an area I was working a few days ago. I wasn't marking as many fish as the previous trip over there, but we did manage to catch three eyes before making a decision to move.

We ran up over the top, and took the lee side down to Mill Point, (on the southeast side of the island), where we set in on the southwest side of the point. We made a pass over the point and headed to the three humps to the northeast of it.
Two fish came off the point, before we fell off the other side. We didn't get another fish as we went over the three humps. My guess is they were probably inside to the east of Mill Point, but I didn't go there to find out.

It was now going on 11am, so without knowing the status of that storm, I decided it would be a better idea to move down to the US side of the line, where Pooh Bear, ReelSport, and many other charters were working. They didn't talk about a very good bite though, so we only made a small pass in and around that area, and caught one little 16 incher, before moving over to the west side of Gull Island Shoal.

We set in at the very top of the shoal and worked the edge in about 25-29 foot of water. We caught two more good eaters there, and for the second time this year, I screwed up my net job. A long story shortened...I wasn't in the right position to net, and with my over-reach I caught the hooks of the lure before the fish was in the net, and while trying to readjust in order to scoop the fish, it squirmed and set itself free. It would have been the largest fish of the day...other than some giant sheephead...and, was about 25-26 inches from what I saw of her. I apologized, but they didn't seem to really that it didn't make it in the boat. (They thought it was a sheephead coming in the entire time...thus, the reason I was not in the normal netting position.. D'oh!)

We were running Bandits from 75-90 back with another one 70/70 with a 2 ounce snapweight ( for those of you who don't know what 70/70 is....let 70 feet of line out...add the snapweight...let out another 70 feet of line, and put the Off Shore board on).

We came back in an hour early, so we were only out for 7 hours today, because the sky was changing and I didn't want to get caught out in a storm (if there was indeed a storm coming). I tried to contact two friends on shore that had radar, but neither one responded in a timely fashion, so we decided to head in. The fish weren't on fire, so it wasn't a hard decision to make.

We are going to make tomorrow a longer day, and give it another shot. I have the same crew again tomorrow...thank goodness....they are so easy to fish with, and very pleasant to hang out with in a boat! They are avid fishermen from Minnesota, and already know how to run planer boards...woot! woot!

Anyway, we got on shore only to have my weather radar app tell me that that big storm had gone south of us. The clouds we saw building were just the outer edges and were not a threat.

The plan tomorrow is to run cranks again, but I'm going to set a few lines out with some "Worm-Burners" and see what happens..

Stay tuned....

Capt Juls