Charlevoix Classic - Practice
Oh the weather, you just never know what its going to do in Michigan. But it sure doesn’t like to cooperate on out of town fishing trips. The week before we talked about how if the fishing is going to be tough at least the weather was going to be nice. Well we couldn’t have been more wrong. The forecast went from beautiful weather, too beautiful for the fishing to be good to just awful. Rain, cold, and wind…lots of wind would be the theme for the weekend.
I had mentioned in my last blog that i was hoping to use the wind to my advantage in this tournament. It didn’t seem like that was going to be the case with 20 - 40mph NW winds in the forecast all weekend. But before we had to come up with some sort of plan we had some fun fishing to do. Instead of going up Thursday night like normal we decided to leave at 5am. We wanted to get some fun fishing in but I also needed some time trying to improve my skills with MEGA Live. Rain was the big problem Thursday. The original plan was to head to Houghton and then up but we would be risking it with potential rain. Heading up the Lake Michigan coast was looking good instead but we ended up sticking to the original plan. Houghton was well…a major disappointment but a good learning opportunity. It was just too warm, yes we caught some fish but it just wasn’t right. We fished 8 or so places that were stacked last year and while most of them surrendered a fish or 2 it wasn’t worth forcing that game. On the trailer it went and to a new lake that we hoped to get better with MEGA Live.
This lake was tiny and we got around some fish. Caught some on the live but the size was just not really that entertaining. It was mission accomplished and cool to fish a new lake. But it was time to keep it moving down the road. Intermediate Lake was on the way so we headed there next. I think I caught one on a tube on my very first cast. We picked away at them before finding a hot spot. This lake had a good average size and even a bonus largemouth for Trevor. One of the more interesting things we saw were all the longnose gars suspended over deep water that would absolutely pound a swimbait. Not easy to hook but it was fun to watch on Humminbird MEGA Live. One thing that was a challenge was that I was without my MEGA 360 on this trip. I needed a new bracket for the Minn Kota Quest and it was really weird for me to fish without it. There are so many things it can do that forward facing sonar can’t in my opinion. At the end of the day it ended up being a nice fishing day. weather was solid, we caught some fish, and explored some new water.
Now for the actual practice report. We hadn’t gone up to pre practice at all. Trevor has never been there and I’ve fished 4 tournaments there. 2 spawn D&R’s and 1 classic in the fall. So I was at least familiar with the lay of the land but I didn’t have any go to spots to go visit. The real problem was that it was going to blow in the opposite direction and most of the places that could be comfortably fished today would be unfishable come tournament day. So really what are we supposed to do? We also didn’t know just how bad it was going to get and what would even be fishable on the north side. 2 of the guys we were staying with had seen Charlevoix under these conditions at a fall classic and 7 boats sunk in that one. Part of the practice strategy was hoping to find something sneaky where it would for sure be calm enough on tournament day. Those areas would also have a ton of boats so we tried to find something off the beaten path. We caught 2 bass doing that and neither of them were on anything that sneaky. At the end of all that we hadn’t found anything that would give use the right clue. With the weather change coming all of the stuff ahead of us would be unfishable on tournament day.
I haven’t spent much time in the South Arm and we had launched in there. With no real intentions of taking the beating that getting there on tournament day would entail we decided to just go fish there and see what it was like. It felt weird, usually are practices are efficient and productive. This was none of the above, just fishing for maybe a future tournament there. Fishing wasn’t great down there either but it seemed like we could catch a few if we went there and covered water. I think at the end of the day I’d caught 5 bass and Trevor had caught all the junk. Pike, walleye, rockbass, and of course some perch. It was better to save all the bass catching for the tournament anyway.
It was just such a weird practice, it was bad, really one of the worst. But it was just so inefficient, unproductive, and it bothered me some. I did get both deep bites on the same bait so maybe that was the one thing we’d learned. We headed to the banquet and prepared for the weather that was coming.
Even though practice was bad, I really wasn’t feeling any less confident. I knew the wind was totally going to switch and it was going to blow hard. Who knew where that was going to move everyone’s fish but I knew it would be very likely they would be in different spots than everyone had found them both during pre practice and official practice. All we could do was go fishing, if we even went fishing during this tournament. Saturday was so bad that a cancellation was likely and Sunday was up in the air. It was a tough spot for the tournament directors to be in all week. I wasn’t going to get wound up whether we fished or didn’t. The only scenario that would have got me fired up was if people could trailer wherever and I am thankful they didn’t do that.
I had mentioned in one of my recent blogs that I would welcome one of those practices where I didn’t know if I could catch a bass or catch 30 pounds. I for sure got my wish on this one!