Phat Phish

Jay, Those Starcraft Fishmasters are an excellent boat. I sure would like to own one. Phat Phish

Better late than never............... Went to Muskegon for the GLF TT event, but severe weather resulted in cancellation. Not to let common sense get in the way, we decided to head out when there was a brief break in the weather. Long story short, we had one knock off and one that got to the boat (decent king), tangled up on the rigger and was gone. Both fish hit the deep riggers (40 - 60 feet down) that had spoons. We were fishing in 65 - 80 FOW. About the time the fish was getting near the boat the wind REALLY kicked up. We went from trolling at 2.2 mph to 0.5 mph with no adjustment to the throttle. From there the waves got ugly quickly. We wound up fishing for only about an hour and then spent about the same amount of time crawling slowly back to port against some pretty fierce waves. Next trip out (third) will hopefully be for the Onekama tournament over Memorial weekend. That is twice now that I have had to severely cut short my trips out, so hopefully I can get a real day of fishing in next time. Third time is hopefully the charm!! I'll report back on the Tuesday or Wednesday after Memorial Day. Eli

I look forward to seeing and/or meeting many of you as the season gets going! Eli

Well, I finally got out for my fist trip of the year. Incidentally it was my first trip ever out of St. Joe. The furthest I have ever ventured south previously was one trip of out South Haven about this time last year. Normally I take my boat out, but I am still working to get it in tip top shape, so I went out on the Bushwacker, or maybe its the Bush Wacker. Either way it was my buddy and I and he had only ever gone out of St. Joe one other time, which was the prior Saturday. We decided to enter the Steelheaders tournament since the entry fee was manageable and it was only one day, which goes over a lot better with the wives than burning up the entire weekend on a two-dayer (not that it will stop us from the two dayers;). So we set up in 20-ish FOW about 1/2 a mile south of the pier heads and trolled around, eventually heading back north to and then past the pier heads. Nothing to show about 1.5 hours into this tournament, which ran from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. We continued north and curled back into 20 FOW on the north side of the pier heads. At this time there were only four other boats on the north side, which I always like to see (not a big fan of crowd fishing). First fish came on rigger with a flasher and peanut fly. Four more were picked up in the next hour heading straight north in 20 FOW - two from double orange crush spoons on two colors of lead on the board and two on thin fins on the boards. With a max of 10 fish for submission we were half way there at 9:30 with 5 coho. Then things went cold and we couldn't pick up a thing on our southward troll back toward the pier heads, so back on the northward troll. We eventually marked a nice school and picked up three fish, one of which happened to be a 6+ pound brown trout on a gold/brown thin fin + two more 'hos. Monkeyed around and wound up getting fish nine (another small coho) a little after 1:00. With nine in box we decided to go deeper and try for a king. The last four fish all came from thin fins on the riggers, so we kept them on our "king troll". In about 40 feet one of the riggers hit hard. The light line set up (12 lb. test) didn't hold up against whatever hit the lure and both the lure and fish were lost. Time was running out...................then the other rigger (silver thin fin 32 feet down) started thumping. Long story short, it was a 13.8 lb. king to close out our box. When all was said and done we won the tournament, the biggest (and only) brown and missed the biggest king, as a very nice 15+ pounder was submitted by another boat. All in all a very good experience for my first trip out of St. Joe. Everyone out there knows how beatiful the water/weather was. The fishing certainly wasn't easy, but we got our fish and made it into the pierheads with 30 minutest to spare! Eli