We fished a combo trip Sat. the 19th to through last Wednesday. Struggled to find a very good pattern for skies until the last day. Part of that struggle was to really feel comfortable with the rocks or weeds and the other part was fishing walleyes. Musky-wise, I will say though that we did move 6 fish and our other boat had one upper 30″ fish on that he lost boatside.
Along the way though, the spots we fished for muskies yielded decent quantities of northern pike. There was in fact some quality involved as I lost what appeared to be a 40-ish inch fish early on the rocks. After refishing another close rock spot and catching a measured 37″ fish, it became evident that I may have lost a fish that approached 45″.
Our successful pattern included dive and rise baits and the best of those were 7″ Cranes (replace the out of the box hooks with quality hooks, the large fish straightened the back hook) reeled under and twitched or jerked and a the 9″ weighted Suick. Both baits seemed to be most successful in perch colors.
We really felt the most comfortable closest to cabbage weed and it was difficult to find decent patches of it, though our best find of this weed seemed to be in 6′- 8′ water in Sucker Bay and Grand View.
Again the northern pike provided us with the most action during the week, though we did find a decent bite for walleye on cranks (mostly shadraps in the #5 and #7 models in gold/black back) in the 11′-14′ water depths. We did not find big numbers of fish and were able to keep most though with a few in the slot mixed in. While there we did hear from some of the experienced fishermen a bite starting to develop out at the mid-lake humps, but we weren’t able to capitalize on it. Also some trolled spinner harnesses on breaks that included 8-9 feet down to 15′. Again our failure (though we did have a fish fry and one man got his 4 fish limit) was in part because we split our fishing day between the ‘eyes and ‘skies.
Water temps reached 70* a couple of times and started around 65* the first night last Saturday. For the most part they hung around the 67*-68* range during the week into Wednesday.
It was a great time and I wanted to thank all who provided info both here and in the pm’s!!!
Mark