5/12/16, Saginaw Bay, Au Gres, Fishing Report

[Trophy Specialist]

 

 

Over the last three days I had clients from Nebraska and Indiana scheduled to fish all three days in a row with me. Tuesday was a blow day though with east winds to 26 knots, so we had to cancel that trip. They ended up fishing for steelhead on the Au Sable River as a fun backup plan. Yesterday we did fish all day, but the big winds from Tuesday ended riling up the water and the bite was very slow for Saginaw Bay standards as they ended up three fish short of their combined walleye limits. The bite was also very light too with more fish lost than caught. We had to troll very slow to get them to bite on Tuesday, which was made hard by the stiff northeast wind blowing well up into the teens pretty much all day long. I had to deploy two driftsocks at times just to slow us down to the 1.3 mph speed that they wanted. We started out today trying a trolling pass right out in front of Au Gres starting off in 35' of water and trolling towards the river mouth. We marked a lot of fish there, but after a long stint with no bites, we pulled lines and ran to where we had been fishing yesterday. The bite there was better than yesterday, but it was sporadic. We would catch a few fish quickly, but when we trolled through that same spot just a short time later, the fish there would be gone. Then it was a guessing game to troll towards where I thought the fish might have swam off too. Fortunately I guessed right most of the time and my clients pulled their limits before noon. I even got to catch some fish for dinner too. We did best in waters 20 to 25 feet deep fishing near two poorly (illegally) marked commercial fishing nets. We pulled spinner/crawler rigs with red/silver being the preferred pattern today . We caught most of our fish close to the bottom, but some did hit suspended rigs too. The bite was very light as we lost about as many as we got today. Today the best trolling speed was on the slow side as anything over 1.4 mph did not produce any hits. The water had cleared up some today, so that helped the catch for sure. I will be taking some time off the water to compete in the USAF National Arm Wrestling Championships in Atlantic City. I'll be back on the water next week.

 

Capt. Mike Veine