Houghton Lake Classic - Practice
The dock talk around practice for the D&R Sports Classic on Houghton Lake was that fishing was BAD. We didn’t have time to make it up there before the off limits so it would just be the one official day of practice for us. That was going to put us at a major disadvantage because out of all the places I’ve fished, Houghton is the most specific of all of them. If you aren’t on the right stuff there it is hard to even catch a bass. I knew lots of teams who had made the trip and every single one of them said it wasn’t going to be as much fun as the Houghton Classic a few years ago.
With only one day, you really have to make some tough decisions about what to do. Time would be short for running around trying to find a bunch of sneaky stuff or trying off the wall techniques. If we were going to have tricks up our sleeve we would have had to do that before the off limits. Fortunately, I have a lot of confidence and a lot of places to look from the last tournament. The bite had to be improving from pre practice or at least we hoped so. Then we also had to manage the weather because we had high winds forecasted for a lot of the day. One cool thing about the night before practice was that we had a great show of the northern lights where we were staying at up by Higgins Lake. It is also just a lot of fun to get away and hang out with our D&R Classic crew.
The obvious choice was to start where I had the most success last time. It was crushing when the 2 places I looked most forward to were just empty. There wasn’t even a shell bed on one of them anymore. It was good to know that things change and I saw it often where new shell beds popped up, shell beds shifted, or shell beds disappeared. It’s no secret those are productive places on Houghton Lake so while I’m not going to post any MEGA SI images of what they look like, I will say that is what I’m looking for. Obviously I’m not going to linger around looking for fish that aren’t there or grinding on shell beds to get them to bite. Humminbird MEGA 360, MEGA Live, and MEGA Side Imaging are doing that work for me. I just needed to see some smallmouth or get a bite or 2 to make it worth my while and label it a tournament spot. It did make it tough to practice around everyone though. Because some stuff I couldn’t get close enough too and other stuff you just wouldn’t want to show exactly where the juice was. I much prefer being on that lake or really any place I’m leaning heavily on Side Imaging alone.
We did find a couple areas holding fish pretty quick but it was obvious that an area of the lake I really wanted to lean on wasn’t going to do it for us. I had a lot of stuff close to each other there and just felt comfortable in that area but this year would be about expanding. I knew that I couldn’t spend a ton of time in areas because we had to beat this big wind. I’d much rather find a productive area but then expand on it close by then having a whole giant Houghton Lake to check. It is an easy place to get too spread out (which we did). But the thought was if we could find a place to get a good start then we could just practice on day 1. That is just one of the things that make multiple day tournaments interesting.
The early portion of practice was met with more disappointment than success but we did uncover an area that would become really important throughout this event. We also weren’t having too much trouble catching fish but we weren’t getting any big ones. Since it was practice and the goal was to find as much as possible and figure the size thing out during the event. A bite or 2 and some activity on the graph was all we needed. So it was safe to assume some good ones were around we just weren’t going to waste a bunch of fish in practice. It wasn’t until mid-morning that we discovered an area that had the potential for a starting spot. From there we got on a little roll finding a few more decent places. I’d also bypassed some stuff that was really “community” and we might start on if we got a good boat number. I wasn’t even concerened if we never even graphed it because it had a lot of fish and a lot of boats last time. We made some jokes about how the forecast was wrong…which instantly turned on the nasty wind and waves and sent us away from the areas we really needed to investigate.
There’s nothing more frustrating than fishing in areas you don’t want to be and still taking spray in the face while trying to side image. It is just so frustrating being unproductive but in the end we did uncover a grass deal that would end up helping us. I still can’t shake the feeling of seemingly wasting hours.
At the end of the day it was a very mediocre practice. We had only caught a couple nice fish but knew it wouldn’t be hard to catch a limit on day 1 at least. We also knew having a good boat number would be critical. If we could just get them good early and have the rest of the day to practice than we felt good about doing decent. If we didn’t get a good start though then this was going to be an uphill battle.