Muskegon Lake D&R - Practice
The pressure was on for this one to not screw up a great year and wrap up team of the year. We had a long way to fall but Muskegon can be very fickle this time of year and has burned me before leading points in D&R. I was determined to not let that happen again and was hoping the hot weather would work in my favor. I hadn’t been out there in awhile but Trevor and I had our Monday nighter there that week.
We decided we might as well take our 40 bucks and burn it because we were just going practicing. In order to save time on an actual practice day and find out if Bear Lake was worth investigating. We caught one nice one before we got in there and then didn’t find anything great, I don’t think we even had one bite off a dock. We actually spent some time just driving around and may or may not have found some things that will be helpful in the future.
After no more keepers in there we headed back out to Muskegon to do some exploring. We caught another nice one in an area and missed 5 flipping bites in another. Both were good signs and gave us a direction to go. We spent the rest of the night determining what areas might have late night activity for a morning starting spot. We never turned up anything but it did show us where some dead water was. Fish catching was weak with our two 3 pounders but I’d still call the night a success.
I planned on spending a weekday out there this time and with rain in the forecast for Friday, Thursday was going to be the best option. Trevor is a senior at Spring Lake so he wasn’t supposed to be able to come. However a timely air conditioner failure happened and school was cancelled for the day. Off we went to put in a 12 hour day in the heat.
Not working hard enough during our practice time wasn’t going to be an excuse if we didn’t catch them in this event. Immediately we figured out some fish were in the grass which is good news for us. Things are always changing on these lakeshore lakes so we would be looking for a lot of new stuff throughout the day. I always spend much of practice exploring areas I don’t necessarily spend much time in vs checking places I have confidence in.
We were idling around with the Humminbirds in one of those not so familiar areas looking for deeper grass. I made one pass where I never really found anything great and almost left. However there was one place that looked intriguing on the Lakemaster map so I swung back around. I liked what I saw on side imaging dropped a waypoint and fired off a cast. A 4 ¾ ate it before it hit the bottom and there were no more casts to be made. What is it with me burning a big bite in every single D&R practice this Season! We definitely needed to investigate this large area little better as it had the potential to be a starting spot. We learned some more ins and outs of it and shook off some more fish. I didn’t really think it was going to be a starting spot by the end of it but I knew it was an area that we could move around in if there weren’t many boats. We also located some smallmouth on a drop nearby so it had that going for it too.
We kept moving and fishing more grass. We were in an area of the lake that has the right stuff and kicks out lots of nice bags. However despite all it has going for it, the area just never works out for me. We pulled the plug on that and went looking for some smallmouth before meeting up with Dave and Kyle at dockers for Lunch. Post lunch we idled bunch and found a lot of the right stuff. We could pretty much call our shots where we were going to get bit. It was probably one of the best and most widespread grass flipping bites I’ve seen on Muskegon. Some small areas were absolutely loaded with them. There’s nothing I’d rather do than flip grass and this was the equivalent to putting a beach ball on a T and asking if we could hit it. We’d gone from just hoping to catch enough to hold on to team of the year to I think we have a decent chance to win this one too. The only problem is sometimes it is hard to predict the quality you’ll get while flipping grass especially if you aren’t setting the hook on any of them. But we had 50ish bites in the grass and had a good bag with the fish we did set on. We had so many places between what we had found and what I knew we were going to fish that I was concerned we would forget some of them. Confidence was sky high and it was going to be difficult waiting a couple days to get out there and fish. It was definitely hard to sit through work on Friday wondering what was going on out there. Then Saturday we did a little family golf thing for my father in law. The girls went to my parents and Amanda was going to stay the night. This meant a total of about 5 hours of solo driving for me thinking about what tomorrow would bring.
Normally I don’t really think about it that much but I really wanted team of the year and I really was just excited about getting out and swinging the big stick in some deep grass all day.