Bay de Noc-FLW Walleye Tour

I just returned from my final tour qualifier tournament of the year, out of Escanaba Michigan. Escanaba is a very nice town on the shores of Little Bay de Noc. If you are not familiar with the area, it is the very North bay on the Bay of Green Bay, part of lake Michigan. Going into the tournament, we knew the bite was going to be very tough, but not many knew just how tough it was going to be.

I approached this tournament knowing we were not going to get bit often and most likely we were going to be pulling spinners/crawlers on boards. This is exactly what we did for 5 days of prefishing and we were lucky enough to put together a pattern that did not produce many fish, but they were the right fish! Like this 10 pound 10 ounce monster I weighed on day one of the tournament

On day one of prefishing we got bit in 23 ft of water one time and that fish ended up being a 27 incher. From there we concentrated on that depth of water no matter what part of the lake we fished. Over 3 days we were able to get a spinner blade/bead/depth and speed combo that would produce about 5 to 6 fish per day. This is not a lot but for this tournament we could only weigh 2 fish over 23 inches so they needed to be good ones.

We also figured out prefishing that the farther we drove South the bigger the fish were. Instead of 26-28 inch fish near Little Bay, we were able to get 28-32 inch fish. Since I needed a good finish to make the tour championship, I had no choice but to make the 100 mile round trip run each day. But, the reward was nice fish like this one if you got bit.

Fishing on Green Bay is interesting to say the least. We caught my different species of fish including, Giant Carp, Catfish, Salmon, Sheephead and Gobies. In addition to those, Adam landed this nice Brown Trout. Since neither Adam nor I fish trout, we really weren’t sure what it was other than we thought it was big. We later found out this is a huge Brown for the area. It was almost 34 inches and weighed over 14 pounds. Like I said, I guess it is a nice one.

For all 3 days of the tournament I fished the same area 40 miles South of Escanaba trolling spinners. The first day I had my 2 fish in the first hour and had lots of time to work on catching smaller fish, to no evail. The second day I only had one bite and that fish was 8 pounds 10 ounces which moved me up to 14th overall. On day 3 I could not get bit as my fish had shifted a 1/2 SE. The 3 fish I weighed over the 3 days were enough for 34th place which was good enough to get me into the Tour Championship. After some bad luck this year, my sole goal of this tournament was to make the Championship and I was fortunate enough to do so.

In addition a big congrats to my teamate Jason Kerr who qualified for his first tour championship and a big thanks to Rick Nascak, John Renchen and Jarrad for their help this year. They did not make the championship, but were right on the bubble to make it in. It would be hard to fish the entire tour without a good team of guys to work with I am thankful to have a great team.

Now it is time to start getting ready for Cleveland!!