Payback Practice - Muskegon Lake
I really hadn’t wanted to start my practice late in the week. But we had some work on Lake Michigan to get done and were just coming off all 3 kids having hand foot and mouth. This meant 4 days of hard work, last minute tackle rigging, and trying to have some family time. I’ve got to give a big shout out to Amanda for giving me the freedom to focus on fishing for 4 days.
I had a pretty good idea of what I was going to do in the tournament. So if I didn’t find anything it wouldn’t be the end of the world. But I did want to find a place that would give us a quick start and eliminate a few other things. I launched the boat at daybreak in pea soup fog and immediately realized I wasn’t going anywhere. I purposely put myself in an area that would likely have some bass eating shad so I was in a good place to start. It was just so dark that nothing was really happening yet. I did get one bite right away though…a big pike. Not the ideal way to start the day but I got my topwater back. Things were pretty slow in the fog as I really didn’t have a choice but to stay on the trolling motor or idle around. Most of the stuff I wanted to graph was on the other side of the lake so the idling wasn’t going to help me much.
I did want to rule out some smallmouth stuff and I don’t know if it was me, the conditions, or that the areas just appeared to be dead. I never caught one of those, I did get a solid largemouth out of the grass in an area that definitely could end up in the rotation. I did have some salmon spoons in the boat so I finally headed over that way. No salmon on the Humminbirds so back to bass it was. I could see well enough to put it on plane so moving around the lake was again an option. I saw some potential for a deep grass stretch when I caught a 3.5 pounder out of it. Unfortunately it was the only bite I got there. It was still dark and foggy so I just went to covering some water with a topwater and checking for some more shad. It didn’t take long to pop one that was approaching 4. It was kind of a random fish but also kind of not. Then I stumbled on to a mega school. They were just eating shad all around me and they looked like decent ones. I was going to have to test the waters and see if any good ones were there. I caught about 10 before I convinced myself to stop and leave it alone. It confirmed that there weren’t any giants but there was a decent amount of 3 pounders to go around. I never caught a single non keeper out of those 10 fish. Definitely could be a starting spot for a quick 15 pounds and there just had to be some 4 pounders mixed in somewhere.
It was pretty obvious to me that if I kept this big topwater in my hand for a bit it might reveal a few schools. It did, however nothing was truly exciting but if things were going poorly I might use them. I caught another kind of random 4 pounder and then graphed a couple places that looked like they might play. I’d definitely fish them tournament day despite not catching one there. I picked up Trevor and we checked on the shad fish I had hoped to see in the morning. They were there but I felt like they were topping out at 3 pounds and weren’t really on the radar for tournament day. We caught another 4 pounder on the topwater and while we knew that wasn’t going to hold for tournament day it was nice to know one was in the area. Once the fog truly lifted, it got incredibly hot, humid, and still out. After 12 hours I finally killed my batteries and luckily it was time to go home. It had been productive but it was also one of those days that they were just biting. It’s too bad the fog had wasted a bunch of my morning because I really didn’t get to everything I wanted to.
I knew we were going to catch them though. I felt like a bad day would be 15lbs and a good day would be closer to 20. I knew the stuff I was counting on was going to give us the right bites but probably not 5 of them. We’d need to come up with a big bite early on those shad or maybe a big smallmouth or 2 in the channel to put us right there and guys that ran would have to not get them all that great. It was going to be interesting either way but before we focused on tournament day, I had to get through a Grand River practice day and the last D&R tournament on the Grand River.