LINWOOD — We were dragging crankbaits in relatively deep water on Saginaw Bay, which was departure from the original plan, which was to troll spoons.
But Mark Gwizdala said he wanted to slow it down.
“They’re catching fish on spoons,” Gwizdala said. “My buddy pulls a lot of spoons but he catches a ton of short fish — I mean 9- to 12 inchers. He catches legal fish, too, but he catches a lot of shorts. He moves a lot faster because he has a big boat and can’t slow down. He’s going 2.3 miles an hour or more. We’re going 1.7 to 1.9.”
The slow troll was paying off as we were catching plenty of walleyes and most of them were solid keepers.
We were running six lines (three less than we could with three of us in the boat). We ran two on planer boards on each side and a pair of 12-foot rods off the stern with lead-core line.
The longer rods took the line away from the boat and by eschewing the boards with the lead-core, Gwizdala was able to run less than full spools, which turned out to be a good move as the fish were hitting the lead-core lines when we had 1 ½ to two colors (15 to 20 yards) out.
Gwizdala credited our success with the lead-core to a new line — Sufix — which has a thinner diameter than most lead-core.
“It gets down seven feet per color instead of the usual five,” he said. “If we were going slowly enough with two colors out we could practically bump bottom.”
There was no need for that as the fish were suspended, mostly in 22 to 25 feet of water. Just about everything we pulled — Flicker Shads, Flicker Minnows and Smash Shads — caught fish, but pink was the hot color and the two lead-core lines produced as many bites as the four lines on boards.
“I think the reason the lead-core works so well is it’s easy to get it at the prescribed depth you want it,” Gwizdala explained. “If you go slowly, you don’t have to put so much line out and it sinks down. Once you figure out what’s working you can duplicate it easily.
And it’s very easy to see the fish bite — there’s no stretch in lead-core so it telegraphs what the lure is doing. You can see what’s happening with the rod tip; if you pick up some weeds or a snag or something, it kills that rod tip. You can read the line very easily.”
Gwizdala said just about everybody’s catching fish on the bay this year, but he’s been doing very well with his crankbait program.
“The biggest problem a lot of guys have is they’re too one dimensional,” he said. “They find one thing that works and they stay with it no matter what. I’ve got a buddy who was out here the other day running crawlers and he caught like five fish on crawlers all day while we were killing them on cranks. You’ve got to be versatile — you’ve got to able to do whatever you need to do to get those fish to bite.
“I like running crawlers, too, but cranks are easier,” he continued, “and you don’t have to mess with the worms getting bit off all the time — you’re not getting your crawlers nipped off by white bass or sheepshead or whatever. And you have to go so slow when you’re running crawlers. In this hot weather the sun just beats you up; it’s a lot cooler when you’re moving faster a little faster.”
It was hot, but not overly so, and there was a nice wind to keep us cool (and keep the flies off). It was pretty easy fishing. We fished through the morning and quit at noon with 21 in the ice chest.
“The bay is in great shape,” Gwizdala said. “There’s a ton of fish out here. There have been quite a few fish in this 23 to 25-foot range and they’ve been out here out here for quite a while. One day they may be a little bit shallower, then one day they’re a little bit deeper. But when get much shallower, you don’t hardly mark any fish. That shallow-water bite, where we’ve done so well so many times, is nonexistent this year.”
Typically when I fish with Gwizdala in June we fish in less than 10 feet of water. He hasn’t done much of it this year, he said, because it hasn’t been productive.
The only question Gwizdala has about the fishery this year is whether the hot weather will move the walleyes out of the bay entirely soon.
“I’m concerned they’re going to move to deep water with all this hot weather,” he said.
(On that note, guys fishing for trout and salmon out in Lake Huron off the Thumb have been reporting catching fair numbers of walleyes out in more than 100 feet of water already this summer. That could slow the Bay bite way down in the weeks ahead.)
“But they’ll come back as soon as it cools back down,” Gwizdala said. “The bay is as good as it’s ever been, certainly. But those fish move around they’re going to be wherever the feed is. When the bait is out in deep water, so are the fish.”
The Link LonkJuly 17, 2020
https://ift.tt/32mXXhn
Bob Gwizdz: Slowing our troll nets walleyes | GO | record-eagle.com - Traverse City Record Eagle
https://ift.tt/3g8jVYU
Troll
No comments:
Post a Comment