West Michigan Bass HOTD – Muskegon Lake
I needed to jump in something and the HOTD series is always a good one to fish. You can pretty much count on fishing against 70-90 boats in these events and the competition is tough. Normally I work a few into the schedule each year but with so much traveling this year I was going to keep it simple and not fish anything “extra”.
With only fishing 2 weekend tournaments so far this year due to cancellations I needed to stay sharp. The best way to do that is by fishing more tournaments. I wasn’t going to really prepare for this one like I would a normal event. I did get out for a couple of hours Tuesday after work just to try and find something. Practice was pretty terrible and I never did find that something. I think I caught 4 small keepers and they were pretty random for the most part.
It made me think that I should just head up to Ludington Saturday and go salmon jigging. But that’s WEAK to not show up to the event because you aren’t “on em”. I said I was going to go so I was going to go. Regardless of the outcome I would probably learn something that would help later on and Muskegon is one of those places you can just junk around and end up with a good bag. Trevor was on board with no plan is the best plan too so off we went.
We weren’t signed up for the early draw so we knew we would be a bad boat number. We ended up being boat 80 and despite that I still got to start where I wanted to. I guess that tells you it wasn’t a very good spot! I was just hoping to get a couple of the right ones to start the day and then go from there. We weren’t fishing for points or anything so there was no reason to ever try and scrounge up a 2 pounder. We ended up getting 3 of the right bites in the first hour and a half but none of them made it to the boat. It was going to be tough to recover from that and we were starting the day with one keeper on a chatter bait and 1 2.5 pounder on a buzzbait.
We pulled up to a familiar spot that had already been fished by a couple boats and snatched another 2.5 pounder. We were just bouncing from shallow to deep at this point hoping we would get a sign of where to get some quality. We weren’t too far from something that I haven’t really fished more than once but is very specific. I found it a long time ago but never really have given it a whole lot of thought. I guess today was a good day to check it out since it was more like a practice day than anything. Right away we got one over 3 off of it. Within the next couple casts Trevor hooked another fish that he said was small. All of a sudden drag starts peeling and we are both confused. I grabbed the net and then it went back to being small again. His line was covered in flathead slime and that poor little rockbass was lucky to escape with his life. That is twice now I’ve seen it on Muskegon where a flathead has eaten a fish that’s been hooked. We lost one more decent fish there and would catch a couple others that didn’t help later in the day.
It was time to make a hot lap around the lake to see what else was firing at this point. Number 5 came shallow on a frog but was just a 14.25 incher. But hey at least we had a limit now. We went and poked around in a grass patch next and picked up 2 decent fish flipping. I wasn’t going to weigh in if we didn’t have over 12lbs and it was a good day for the girls to come up to the weigh in. So it was a little bit of a relief to text Amanda fairly early on that if they still wanted to come to the weigh in they could. After getting a couple decent fish in grass we decided to go run a few patches. The action was good but the size was frustrating. We kept culling little by little and had a solid bag but we were just lacking that 4 pounder.
Finally, we hooked another good fish on a spinning rod, I saw just enough of it to tell it was a bass. It just kept digging under the boat and eventually just came off. That was a true heartbreaker because we were so close to it but never got a good look to tell just how big it was. I would bet it would have culled out one of our 2.5 pounders no problem though.
We just needed that big bite and I would be confident we’d get paid. We weren’t having any luck finding a big largemouth so I guess it was time to go try some risky inconsistent smallmouth spots. Well guess what they didn’t pan out and that’s ok. We caught some small ones and one decent largemouth that I thought was going to be the one when we hooked it.
Still plenty of time to get a big one and it was time to try another one of those spots that I really haven’t fished much. We got 2 bites off of it and one was a 3+ pounder that jumped off. Execution today was killing us! But it did lead us to just kind of keep fishing around for a little bit. The area just looked right despite never having much success there in the past. We would end up getting 3 more keepers there and one 3+ that would cull for us. Now we really needed a big one and we went exploring. I knew of a couple areas close by that sometimes get chopped up eel grass mats. Unfortunately there wasn’t enough chopped up stuff quite yet. Then ran some new water to end the day. Nothing ever panned out, I did have one fish that felt strong bite but I was too slow on the hookset.
We made something out of nothing and had a decent bag so we weren’t really even bothered by some of the missed opportunities of the day. We learned a few new tricks and caught a bunch of fish so the day was a success in my book and the girls were going to get to see some nice fish. Mabel legitimately tried to grab one out of the livewell by the tail. I think by next year she will be ready to help bag them up. She can be pretty shy so I was surprised when she wanted to go across the stage for weigh in and go pick up the check. It is always fun for me when the girls get to come to the weigh and see the show. We ended up in 13th place with 14.59, we actually tied the team ahead of us but lost on a big fish tiebreaker.
I’m very anxious for this weekends D&R tournament on White Lake. I don’t really know what to expect since there really isn’t that much grass this year. It certainly isn’t going to be in my wheelhouse but I will do my best to come up with something. I’ve been thinking about it a lot so I have a few ideas.