This past week a Grant Sorensen, Joel Nelson and I took one of our first trips for the year up the north shore looking for big lakers, kings and steelhead.
Here’s the report back, with some video to boot!
The bite was very good but it took some serious looking to find them with surface temps in the mid to upper 60’s. Morning of Day 1 we ran 50+ miles in search of cooler water that never materialized. Isle Royale was a complete bust. We finally settled on a reef surrounded by deeper water (500 – 700 feet) near Grand Portage. Once we put the program together the action was fast paced. Day one was better than day two. Day two we had 24 fish in the boat by 1 PM when we finally lost track of things and stopped counting. Mostly lakers but we did get 4 – 6 steelies each day along with a couple kings each day as well.
Big spoons on riggers and big spoons on 832 Lead Core with 2 Oz snap weighs behind the boards worked best. Crankbaits behind boards just weren’t producing for us on this trip hence the switch to spoons and lead behind the boards which is a bit unconventional (at least for us) but after some fine tuning we were off and running. In fact it worked so well we plan to dig into this presentation further in subsequent trips as it should be an ideal presentation any time the fish want spoons over cranks. We only have 2 riggers on my boat but with the lead and snap weight program we can easily run 3 lines per guy and put the lures right where they need to be and the fish seem to prefer the action of the spoons behind the lead over the riggers… at least during this trip.
If you’ve not tried the 832 lead core it really deserves a look due to the depth advantage it has over other lines… while we were getting a feel for how to fish it we were snagging up big spoons in 80 – 90 feet of water using 10 colors of lead with a 2 – 4 OZ snap weight at 2.3 mph (ooops).
It is impressive how much deeper that new lead core will take a bait. On 10 colors we figure we were seeing a minimum if 20 – 30 more feet of depth than with standard lead. Once we got the experimentation behind us and the program together (7 – 8 colors lead with 2 oz snapper when the fish were deep. 5 colors when they were up shallow) the lead core outproduced the down riggers 3 – 1 and allowed us to put out a solid spread pulling spoons without the use of dipseys.
We targeted 60 – 80 feet in the AM or late in the day and 100 – 130 during the day. Video to follow in a couple days. All in all it was a great trip that forced us to hunt down new water and areas we had never fished before using a presentation that was basically a “make it up as we go along” deal for us.
