Tuesday, June 26, 2007



We have only been out on the Saginaw Bay three times since April. The good news is that all of our trips have ended with limits. I have to say that the Bay fishing is very good this year and if you work at it you can find some nice sized walleyes.

June 16th we fished from the Spark Plug east out to number 1. We fished from 6:30am - 1:00pm and put twenty walleyes in the boat. The fish were all from 15 - 21 inches. We were running crawler harnesses 4 to 6 feet off of the bottom with Berkly Gulp night crawlers at 1.5mph. The most active colors were fire tiger and blue with silver strips.

June 22nd we fished one mile north of the spark plug in 22 FOW and again had very good success. We used crawler harnesses and 2oz bottom bouncers back 100'. The fish were average size 15 -20".


June 24th we fished out of Au Gre and ended up limiting out in 5-hours. We fished from 12:30pm - 5:30pm out about 6.5 miles in 40FOW. We marked several good schools of fish and were able to capitalize on some larger fish. We ended up landing 21 fish, lost 5 and put 15 in the box. The best fish of the day was 29" followed by four fish that were 26 to 27 inches.

We fished with 1.5oz bottom bouncers and crawler harnesses off of in line boards at 1.6 mph. During our fishing we also caught fish on crawler harnesses lead by a floating rapala. When fish are feeding on meat and I find them suspended I like to rig up a floating crank bait minus the hooks in front of a 5' long crawler harness and a snap weight. This gives me the ability to put the bait at the required depth when fish are suspended. One last change I make is to change the back hook on all of my crawler harnesses to a treble hook. It doesn't effect how the bait runs and helps keep more fish on.


Good luck......

Friday, June 15, 2007

Still Catching Walleyes



I've been fishing three times since my last fishing report. I fished June 1st and landed 4 walleyes all of them were in 6FOW of the lighthouse point or as the bass fishing guys call it the bass bedding ground. We trolled the area at 1.9mph using small bomber (Red / White).

Fished again on June 10th in the same area and picked up five walleyes with one being 22" and two nice small mouth bass. Small tail dancers were the ticket.





June 13th was my last trip out and we ended up getting four walleyes all 15 - 19 inches. I'm thinking that the fishing in 5 to 6 FOW is about done. The water temp was 82-degree's F at 2 foot below the surface. On this trip we didn't catch any pike or bass which was odd.


My next fishing trip is tomorrow morning on the Saginaw Bay. We are fishing in a local tournament sponsored by the Eagles 1010. Everyone I have talked to down here in Bay City are telling me that they are slamming walleye in 16 to 20 FOW using meat at 1.6mph. I'll find out tomorrow and I'll post the fishing report by Monday.


Good luck fishing.

Friday, June 01, 2007

2007 Upper Peninsula Fishing Trip



This years team fishing trip to Michigan's Upper Peninsula was AWESOME. The fishing was the best I have seen in ten years.
We headed up to Curtis on Tuesday (5-22) and started out fishing on Big Manistee Lake at 2:00pm. We didn't even get our second rod set and we had our fist walleye and shortly after that we had another fish. Fishing was excellent on the big man, but we didn't catch any big walleyes. We fished until dark and ended up with 15 walleyes for dinner. We found that Brown colored Storm Junior Thunder Sticks, Trout colored tail dancers (at drak) and blue back with clear bottom 3 inch bombers worked great.
Wednesday we fished Autrain Lake and again limited out with 15 walleyes. The weather was OK with high winds which caused us to move to the south end of the lake. Autrain is a great walleye lake. Trolling can be hard do to the weeds, but if you can find the breaks by the weeds you will do very well. Our favorite bait on Autrain is the Storm Junior Thunder Stick trolled 45 feet behind the boat. On the outside rods we run Tail Dancers normally black and gray or trout colored.
Thursday we fished South Manistee Lake and only caught eleven keeper walleyes, but the South lake has bigger fish then Autrain and Big Man. Early in the year the best method on the South lake is to troll deep diving baits into the shallow rocks and the turn your boat out and drag the baits off of the breaks in to the 7 foot waters. The only issue with South Manistee lake is the shallow boat launches.
Friday we headed over to Forest Lake and limited out. Forest Lake was much harder to fish do to all of the logs and stumps. I would not recommend trolling in Forest Lake because of the snags and stumps. You need to pay attention when traveling the lake because of all the floating wood, rocks bars, and stumps that are close to the surface. The lake has one good launch and the fishing is great for pike and walleyes. I recommend jigging with bright colors with leeches and gulp because of the water stain. We are planning on fishing Forest again in July.
I could go on forever about how great our fish trip was this year, but to sum it up our team ended up boating 187 legal walleyes on four different lakes. We caught a lot of pike some as larger as 36 inches and a few perch. I was also surprised at the number of DNR visits we had, we were stopped on three out of the four lakes and checked out.
I'm heading up to Houghton Lake after work today. I'll report the action on Monday.
Good luck fishing.