7/24/15, Saginaw Bay, Au Gres, Fishing Report

[Trophy Specialist]

After a very successful trip on Wednesday, I had a couple scheduled days off, but with very stabile weather all week in the area, it was driving me nuts to be home working on writing assignments when the fishing was on fire. I had been working out the details of helping out a friend of mine by getting them on some walleyes on Saginaw Bay for an episode of Great Lakes Fisherman's Digest TV. With the weather ideal though, and with me having an open day today, we got it all together and met at Au Gres this morning for a day of filming some fishing action. We went out in John Bergsma's boat, a new 21' Crestliner Authority powered by a 225 horse power, Mercury Verado. The boat was also decked out with 9.9, hp Mercury Pro Kicker and a 36 volt, Motorguide, XI5, auto pilot, bow mounted, electric motor and all the other bells and whistles you can imagine. My main task for the day was to direct them to some good walleye fishing and to supply the rods, reels, lures and knowhow for putting nice walleyes in front of the camera. The wind was about double the velocity of what the National Weather Service had predicted today, so we set up for our first trolling pass with Big Charity Island offering us some protection form the waves. We started out in shallow water and then trolled north, with the wind into deep water catching walleyes everywhere we went. We made two trolling passes and had put enough walleyes in front of the cameras to make several shows. There were a lot of gobies in that area and they were steeling crawlers like crazy, so John pulled out some Uncle Josh port rind that was a night crawler imitator specifically made for trolling for walleyes. We cut the 6" port rind in half, and put it on my hot harnesses, and the walleyes ate them up like crazy. Towards the end of the trip, we were catching more walleyes on the side of the boat with the port rinds compared to the other with crawlers, so I have some for tomorrow and will give them another try then. Our fish today were mostly nice sized ones over 20 inches. We trolled with the same setbacks in shallow and deep water, but just went faster shallow and slower deeper to keep the lures within five feet of bottom. In the up and down bottom structure of that area, that system works great. It was a lot of fun fishing today with a camera crew. Even the guys behind the cammera got in on the action as everybody caught their limits of walleyes on this awesome day of fishing on the Bay.

Capt. Mike Veine

[Priority1]

Mike, Thanks for the report and GJ as always.