On The Go
It has been a go go go the last few weeks. We really haven’t been home much at all so I haven’t had a chance to sit down and write at all. First we were on a week vacation, then the 4th of July and Mabel’s Birthday, then some intensive field work, then finally back to the east side of the state for my brothers wedding (congrats Todd and Morgan). It has been busy but it has also been a lot of fun!
I’ve gotten to sneak some fishing in between it all too. On vacation we were in Leland, which puts Grand Traverse Bay, Lake Michigan, and Lake Leelanau all right there. I fished them all and while I wish I had more time, I definitely fished more than last year. As all the kids get older the requests to go fishing get more frequent (and louder) and it gets easier to get them out on the water. Lake Leelanau was the spot for the kids fishing and some crawdad catching. They aren’t quite ready to grab crawdads yet in the water but did a good job of wrangling them once I threw them on the bank. They also got to eat them for the first time. We caught some smallmouth, perch, rock bass, and sunfish. A few got kept for a sampler fish fry and I think that really adds something to the fishing trip for the kids. I got to work on my MEGA Live game a little while I was there too. North Lake Leelanau is a tough lake for me but at least I didn’t have all the other “fish” to look at like I do around home.
My only serious fishing trip was one to the bay. It was slick calm conditions which made the post spawn bite tough. There were some stragglers on beds too and I probably caught 30 fish on the day between bedders and shallow post spawners. Not really a whole lot of excitement and I struggle to find any trout or ciscoes in that section of the bay. As much as I love the bay I had my fill, I’d much rather be there later in the summer when the fishing is a little more diverse in that area. Other than getting the kids in on the action the highlight of the fishing part of the trip for me was a wad of ciscoes I found out in Lake Michigan. I barely had anytime out there so I got incredibly lucky to stumble on a school of them just munching blade baits in shallow water. There is another cisco recipe to follow this blog, I really like eating those things! Overall though it was a really great vacation and I’m looking forward to next year already.
I’ve also gotten to fish a couple Monday night tournaments since we got back from vacation. Trevor and I had a good night experimenting on White and caught 15 pounds. Side note, I found some more White Lake treasure floating around in the form of a nice small trash can. That brings my number of White Lake treasures I’ve found floating around to 5! Our other tournament was a comical one on the Grand River. We were pros at having them come off for no reason, at least we were able to laugh about it on the water. Hopefully we were just getting that out of our system before the weekend. We are going to show up to the HOTD tournament on White and see what happens. We were also going to fish the Big Stack Super tournament. However, the boat count was really low. Once we found that out there was no way we were putting our money in that unless a small craft closed the lake. It’s unfortunate that the tournament got cancelled but I’m relieved at the same time because I haven’t and wasn’t going to have time to prepare. Normally I wouldn’t care that much but with an 1100 dollar entry I’d like to have some idea of what is happening on Muskegon Lake.
Hopefully Payback will try again next year but they’ve got to bring something different if guys from all over west Michigan are going to fish. I’m not just talking about guys from Grand Rapids to Muskegon. But you are going to have to draw boats from Kalamazoo, Indiana, the east side, and even from the North of us. For a truly major tournament to exist over here it’s going to have to draw teams who don’t normally show up and fish. I don’t know how you accomplish that but I’d love it if someone could figure out how. Also closed lake tournaments are going to draw more boats over here, period, end of story. That is just a fact, there are just a few teams that really want to run willy nilly all over the place. I can tell you with my aging and out of warranty boat I am not one of those teams. Even if I had a brand new boat I don’t have the time to be checking 7 different lakes. It’s also a fact that if one of those other lakes is on it will beat the local lake every time. Big bag potential is just different in other fisheries vs the ones we are going to launch out of and that isn’t a secret. Lots of factors at play here and they are different for everyone.
Let’s hope we can get on a roll this weekend because we have the 2nd D&R next weekend on Muskegon. Feels good to have a couple events lined up since the first half of the year has been light on tournaments for me. I don’t really know what to expect from Muskegon as I haven’t been out there since early June but I know it will be different from the previous years. Based on what I saw in June, I know it probably isn’t going to set up really great for me and Trevor but we are going to try our best to figure something out.