I made my first trip to LOTW this weekend and it was a blast. My brother and I met my uncle at his new cabin on Rocky Pt. Thursday night. Armed with a Warrior 177, great electronics, and no experience on the lake, we headed out to some of the reefs. We marked very few fish near the reefs, but some scattered about 100 feet off. We decided to pull spinners and cover some water. In a half hour we boated a couple nice walleyes and some dinks. We stayed out another couple hours and ended up bringing in 5 eaters with many more released.
We hit the lake early Saturday in hopes of finding fish up on the reefs. Again, no luck. We started running to another reef, but on the way I spotted a big school of fish on the graph. We drove back over them and it was suspended fish about 10 feet off the bottom. We did not have any deep diving cranks, but my Uncle did have his downriggers stowd away. We dug them out and all the crankbaits on board. We started connecting with fish right away. We kept running over the school and picking up 1 to 2 fish each time. The most active fish were hanging around 20 feet down. The school was on the move so we had to search for them each loop through. The fish were hammering the Hot Tiger shad rap. With more experimenting, we found a red Wally Diver and perch taildancer to work well too. In 5 hours we caught around 25 walleyes with a nice 24 incher and a couple 22s being the biggest.
Sunday we went to the same area and started downrigging at 9am. The fish were very spread out and the strikers were few and far between. Interestingly, most of the biters were the deeper fish in 27-30 fow. By noon, we had 11 nice fish in the box and just as many released. It was time to call it a day and get ready for a long drive. Overall, a very good trip. It felt good to get on a new body of water and have the success that we did. I know I could not have done that well this time of year on any of the lakes I regularly fish.