Well ladies and Gents we finally have open water to chase fish again!!!
Talk about a long off season! We were able to dodge the rain showers to slip out today and enjoy this nice warm up (we got up to 65 degrees today). What a day it was!
I decided to launch a little later than I normally would just to make sure I could see any residual ice floating around out there. I arrived at Huron public access at 8:30am. Almost all the ice had cleaned out of the river by this point with the three inches of ran we have received the last few days…..I was beginning to think I need to start construction on an Arc �� .
We made our way out the river and I pointed her towards the dumping grounds in search of fish. I didn’t make it a half mile out when my lowerance started picking up color. This is the reason I use thru hull transducers, it allows me to mark at high rates of speed and I can quickly rule out a lot of dead water. When you are running down the lake at 40ish mpg as long as you have your settings right you will begin seeing orange color lines appearing on your graph. These are all fish, being that active Walleye always suspend and those are the ones I target it makes it nice to be able to pick them up. On the contrary if they were on structure or laying towards the bottom this technique would not work as well. So just keep that in mind.
We continued on solely just chart plotting trying to find out how big the schools were and the directions that they ran so that we would be able to come back and troll across them. This time of year especially you are trolling at a slow rate of speed usually between .08-1.5 mph as the water is still very cold. This means you are not going to cover a lot of ground with any type of efficiency, so making sure you know where the schools of fish are and that you are trolling into more fish is critical to success.
As they have been in years past I found fish were abundant around most of the area in relation to the dump. For those of you that have not fished here this is a large flat that gradually gets deeper the further out you go, it has a section of two miles by two miles that the city of huron has been dumping their dredging material off shore for decades when they dredge the river. This provides very nice structure in otherwise a Barron flat. These fish typically stage here waiting to run up the Sandusky bay to spawn.
Today, I found these fish favored the east side of the dump and the school ranged for more than three and a half miles. Once I had this information I moved up to the upwind side, spun the boat around and began trolling with the waves. We began deploying rods with a mixture of P10s and Deadeye Juniors both being assisted by a 2oz weight. These fish were between 20-35’ down which is perfectly suspended in 44 foot of water. I set the ipolit at 1.4 mph and off we went.
I got the third board out on my side and saw my outside board begin racing back with a fish on. This ended up being our first fish of the morning and it was a nice healthy 6.5 pounder and it came on a blue chrome p10. Once reset my graph was absolutely loaded with marks I knew it wouldn’t be long. Not five minutes later we had 4 boards go off at once. Talk about total chaos!!! Kris and I took our time and were able to land all four fish and they were all solid fish ranging from 5-7 pounds. Before we could even begin getting rods back out we had more fish on, by the end of that we had one rod left out of the 12 we had set. To say we were on them was an understatement!!
These fish were straight up FEEDING today. We were actually struggling to even get rods reset before they were going off again. Believe it or not we had two different times that the baits got hit while we were trying to put the board on. You know fishing is hot when that’s happening.
We quickly rounded off our four man limit in a little over an hour and headed in. This is my favorite time of the year to fish as they are in large groups, ramps are not crowded and the fish are big and plentiful. If you are looking for a MOUNTER, this is the time to be here!
Key take aways, trust your graphs and learn how to read them. Spend the time to get comfortable with them and do not be afraid to put some miles on the boat looking for fish in ensure you are able to stay on a steady stream of them.
With the weather being warm this week as long as the rain showers hold out, I’m planning on fishing!
See our latest out there!
Captain Matt
