White Lake D&R 2023 - Practice
White Lake in June always scares me. It seems that it is just as easy to catch 11lbs as it is to catch 20lbs and it is harder for me to target the right sized fish. Instead it is more of a game of just catching as many as I can and seeing where it falls at the end of the day. There is always the hope of finding something really good so Trevor and I headed up on Thursday to see what was going on.
We launched at 5am hoping to scope out some fish actively feeding on alewives in the dark. However it either wasn’t happening or we just missed it. We really didn’t find any shallow alewife action anywhere in the lake and were pretty disappointed by that. That was definitely our hopes to a quick start on Saturday. We just started covering some water looking for active fish and it did not take long to find some. Despite it being 46 degrees out they were smashing topwater, well not all topwaters. Trevor was throwing a popper and I was throwing a choppo. I think he probably caught 10+ and I never even had a blow up on the choppo. I did sneak a couple in on a chatterbait but it was surprising how specific they were on the topwater style.
Things got interesting from there as the fishing was just all around good. We found some stuff that was specific but most of the areas we had you just had to fish through them and hope for the best. There wasn’t a whole lot going on out deep for us but we did get some quality out there. There’s a lot of promise for some summertime action on some of the areas we found but it just wasn’t going to be the primary deal in this event. By the end of the day we’d caught them on about 20 different rods and we’d run into some quality. Definitely 1 bite over 5, another over 4, and a mystery bite that seemed bigger than the others. All of them came in areas where we expected to get bit and while they weren’t super specific they weren’t totally random either.
We were feeling confident that catching fish wasn’t going to be a problem it would just be if we got the big bites or not. We also knew it would be critical to get a good start as there was quite a lull especially if the wind didn’t blow. We spent some time looking around when it was calm but did not have anything on beds we were going to go to. The largemouth bite was good enough that we felt we just needed to devote more to trying to find that one special spot. We never found it but there was hope we would stumble onto it during the tournament. It was low stress going into this one since we knew that we would get a couple bites, boat number didn’t matter, and there were several areas we were comfortable starting on. From there it was just taking what the day gave us and making it into whatever we could.
The one problem I was going to have was managing all the different rods I would use throughout the day. It was all over the place as we were going to fish anywhere from 3 feet to 20 feet and with a combination of moving baits and plastics. About the only real strategy we had was that we were better off to just keep lines in the water vs running around all day. That isn’t how I really like to fish but with fish spread out vs being specific it should work into our favor. We also knew we were going to have to manage the pressure and sheer numbers of boats during the tournament. This is one thing that really makes tournament fishing different than just going fishing. It is a different mindset, a different set of circumstances, and the lake is truly a different playing field on tournament day.