Road Trip
Every once in awhile it is fun to have a little adventure. Take a trip with a whole lot of unknown and see how it works out. That’s just what I did recently and it was one of those trips that exceeded expectations and we accomplished just about everything we hoped to.
Luckily I’ve got some friends who think the same way and a perfect looking forecast. Drew and I had kicked around the idea of going to South Haven to see about some coho’s and lakers. But once heading up to Grand Traverse Bay got brought up, plans shifted north.
We’ve both got quite a bit of time on the bay targeting all the “stuff” that lives there. However none of it came at this particular time of the year. We had an area from ice fishing a few years ago to at least use as a starting point. It rarely happens this way but it took one drop to get the party started. From what we could tell we were on a lot of ciscoes and usually they are eager biters. So we caught a couple and then went searching for burbot. We tried tactics similar to what we would use ice fishing on the same spots. However we never got bit, I do believe we marked 2 of them though. Going to have to revisit that next march under the cover of darkness. Catching a burbot out of a boat is extremely high on my priority list.
It was slick calm and we headed back out to the hordes of ciscoes we had previously located. We caught a few more but were having trouble staying on them and getting them to commit. The slick calm conditions weren’t helping and we made a move out of frustration to try and find some fresh fish. We pushed in shallower and started getting a mixed bag of cisco, lakers, and even a couple big whitefish. I just love how anytime you are actually casting a blade bait/spoon out there you truly don’t know what it will be. Marking them and fishing vertically it is much easier to tell if it is trout or cisco. I still haven’t figured out whitefish yet but I always feel lucky to incidentally catch them out there.
The wind was kicking up now and positioning the ciscoes right on a piece of structure/break. The rest of the day was entirely too much fun. Jigging spoons, Blade Baits, and Clam Tikka Minos all caught fish. Once the wind/current set them up you knew if you marked them you would get bit. Eventually we decided to go explore some more and see if we could get on some schools that were only lake trout. We checked deeper in the 120-150 foot zone on another ice fishing area. Sure enough we found what we were looking for however they were much more spread out. Anytime we could find them though we would get a few before the school broke up.
Eventually we had to call it a day and pointed the truck south. I was able to snatch my boat on the way home as well so everything worked out really well. Huge thanks to my buddy Brandon for letting it stay in his barn for the winter. I got it out over the weekend for a shakedown cruise and I don’t think I’ll be leaving the trout alone anytime soon.