Houghton Lake Walleye Report

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......