8/4/15, Saginaw Bay, Au Gres, Fishing Report

[Trophy Specialist]

For the second day in a row we had to curtail the charter due to squalls blowing through the area. Also for the second day in a row, my clients caught two fish shy of their limits and likely would have limited out if we could have concluded the charter much like yesterday too. The bite today was extremely light as we lost probably as many walleyes as we caught. They were just nipping at the lures and not hooking up solid. We fished again north of Big Charity Island taking a trolling pass in shallow first, but coming up empty there. We then moved deeper and found some action there, but it was pretty slow through the morning hours with the wind switching from west to southerly. When the wind picked up though, the fish turned on and we had one very good trolling pass taking about 10 walleyes in short order, but then a squall popped up right over us and when it passed the wind switched back to the west and the bite slowed down to a crawl once again. We then had another squall pass to the north of us, but when we saw another menacing looking squall line developing on a course towards us, we pulled lines and called it a day. Besides walleyes, we also caught one nice smallmouth bass, one catfish, and several sheephead. I pulled mostly spinner/crawler rigs today, but I did do some experimenting with other stuff, which did not produce at all. I pulled 3 ounce bottom bouncers just off bottom adjusting the running depth by slowing down and speeding up as we went over the varied depths of that rocky, structure laden area. I ran both natural and bright florescent spinner patters and everything got hit equally so no real color preference was evident. We trolled at speeds that ranged form 1.3 to 2.2 mph and caught fish at all speeds. Despite the challenging weather conditions my clients from various parts of Michigan still indicted to me that they had a good time. They are waterfowlers so today probably seemed like a very nice day to them. The weather is predicted to be more stable tomorrow, so that will be a good thing though in my book.

Capt. Mike Veine

[JWheeler]

Nice job as always TS! Thanks for the detailed report!