Yankee @ the Oak 8/19-8/21

[Yankee Troller]

8/19 (morning trip) – This morning we had Big Lou, and Little Lou, Ferrari owners of Lugia’s Ice Cream in Spencerport, NY with us. If you live on the West side of Rochester you’ve heard about their gigantic proportions of ice cream they serve their customers! With the one day three fish tourney the following day I wanted to check the inside waters to see if any Kings were in that “staging†phase yet. We set up in 100’ of water right out front of port and headed East/North East. We fished less than 200’ for the entire morning with a decent picture, and plenty of action for the two guys we had on board. We ran our typical spread minus a chute copper. We ran spoons on our three Cannon DT10’s, paddle/fly combos on the wires behind Walker Deeper Divers, and lastly a 400 and a 500 copper off our Big John Otters. The 500 copper pulling meat, and the 400 pulling a Wonderdot Smartfish/A-TOM-MIK Shredded Glow Hammer. The 500 was our big fish taker, along with an A-TOM-MIK Bobble fly (A-TOM-MIK # 121) behind a chrome dot Dreamweaver Spin Doctor or a white dot Dreamweaver Spin Doctor on the wires. That has been a great fly for us recently by the way! The fly was picked out by my brother at Fat Nancy’s in Oswego because he “liked the name!â€

We found what we went looking for, and figured we had a starting point for tourney morning! We cleaned 3 Chinooks all right around the 20lb mark, a nice Steelbow, and a couple of Brown Trout. The skips were plentiful, and gave us constant action while we looked for those big bites.

8/19 (evening trip) – We headed out around 4pm with a little bachelor party action with a good group of guys and their beer. We headed out to the same waters we fished in the morning, and we were attacked by skips. We saw the big fish down there and gave it our all, but all we could manage for Big Kings was one on the wire behind a Walker Deeper Diver. Again, it took Mr. Bobblehead behind a chrome dot Dreamweaver Spin Doctor. We did slide out a little bit and got into some Steelbows on our sliders to help put some meat in the cooler. Overall, a slow trip, but the screen on the inside got better as the night went on. I knew the morning was going to be a good one!

8/20 – I was very proud of the bachelor party this morning. Figuring they would have went out and party it up the night before, but they fooled us. They were at the boat nice and early, and ready to tackle some Lake Ontario beasts. We got out to the fishing grounds very early, and we were able to get all the rods in the water over an amazing picture on our Humminbird 1157. Once that picture started to disappear the rods started to fly just like last weekend. This morning we were looking for 3 big fish, so we ran a meat rig deep on our center rigger, and magnum spoons above it on the other two. On our wires we pulled Walker Deeper Divers followed by paddle fly combos, and lastly a 400 and a 500 copper off our big john otter boats.

A mirror image of the previous day minus some of those skips, but we added in a few more big guy bites. We worked the 140-200’ range, and had a great morning bite followed by a late morning lull. When that lull hit we pointed it north and found a nice pod of fish about 25N where we almost quaded up on smaller Salmon and Steelbows. Knowing we needed one more “big guy†to get into check territory we slid into that 120’ range late in the day and the screen just lit up. Not long after we settled in there we were doubled on majors. A Northern King Sea Sick Waddler fished off our middle rigger, and the Bobblehead fly on the wire. We got the last fish we needed, which was an 18lb fish to replace a 16lb fish.

When our fish hit the scales we were in 3rd place, and by the end of weigh in we had slipped into 5th place. Our three biggest totaled 61 pounds anchored by a nice 24lb brute, and only 2lbs away from 2nd place. First place ran away with the tourney with a three fish catch weighing 79lbs!

8/21 – We knew where the big guys were, and we had a nice three generation charter joining us on this morning. We got out there nice and early, and deployed the same program we had been running all weekend. This time we started a tad bit shallower than the previous two days, and ran a 300/400 copper instead of the 400/500. The 400 copper was the MVP today! It took 4 shots in under an hour, and possibly put the largest, or second largest, fish on our deck of the season. The highlight of the day/weekend was a nice 29lb male which ate a meat rig on the 400 copper. The screen was absolutely amazing in the inside waters, but only a few boats had them dialed in the rest of the morning, and we weren’t one of them. We teetered on making the run offshore, but I am glad we didn’t because about noon we were chased off the water by some big thunder boomers.

Our catch for the morning would consist of a few kings, a nice Steelbow, and a Brown Trout. Not a limit catch on this morning, but the customers were overly excited about boating that huge 29lb brute, and were even more thrilled when they saw the amount of meat that came off it.