8/6/15, Saginaw Bay, Au Gres, Fishing Report

[Trophy Specialist]

As I was running back to port today, I declared today to be the most beautiful day of the year and my clients from Grand Blanc and Brighton, MI agreed. We had blue skies all day over the Bay with puffy, fair weather clouds over land to add contrast to the picturesque day. The temperatures were cool in the morning, but with a high of about 75 degrees, low humidity, and a light easterly breeze for most of the day, it was comfortable to say the least. We started out heading back to where we had been fishing north of Big Charity Island, but the water temperatures there had taken another nose dive and after an hour or so of trolling there, we only had one catfish strike to show for our efforts. Some of my other fishing buddies that I was in contact with also had not found any fish in that area either, so it became apparent that the walleyes there had gotten tired of all the constant water temp fluctuations and had left the area. I pulled lines at about 9:00 and ran to my plan B spot, but only caught a couple walleyes there in an hours worth of fishing. We then pulled lines once again and headed to my plan C spot and started to take some walleyes there right away. Once I figured out the best pattern, it was pretty steady action until we limited out with 20 walleyes by about 12:30. We had to sort through some undersized walleyes and perhaps a dozen sheephead too, so the action was pretty good in that spot. The keeper walleyes there were perfect eating sized fish in the 16 to 23 inch range. We caught them by pulling meat behind bottom bouncers right on the lakebed at 1.7 to 1.9 mph. The faster speeds helped to reduce the occurrence of sheephead and also kept the gobies from steeling the crawlers. When I bumped the speed to 2.0 though, the action stopped. The fish hit everything I had in the water today, so no pattern or color preference was noticed. We did take a lot of fish off the flat lines though, so those were certainly worth the extra effort to run. Even tough the bite was tough to find today, we still enjoyed an awesome day on the Bay and with ideal weather conditions, it doesn't get much better than that.

Capt. Mike Veine