Michigan City 5/13 PM

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Michigan City 5/13 PM

Had stuff going on in the morning so didn't get out until around noon.  Fished until about 7:15  Still having some engine strangeness with timing and idle RPM changing on its own (suspect something is hanging up in the advance on the distributor), so stayed within a few miles of shore.  Not a lot as far as marks went, pretty sporadic.  Water temp at surface ranged from 50 - 52, ball temp 48 - 50 when in the lower water column.  Trolled out to about 60 ft. while setting lines and turned west running bottom tracking on the ball with a variety of spoons. Ran the other rigger between 30 and 40 moving it every so often.  Ran Spindoctor / fly combo and flasher / fly combo on mag dipseys 60 - 80 ft back, keeping them in the lower portion of the water column.  Ran thin fin on one board and jet diver / spoon combo on the other.  Had I been thinking I would have just pulled out one of the lead core rods and done that instead...  I'm still a novice at this, so it's a learning experience every time.

Kept seeing small marks in 10 - 15 ft of water which I thought was just noise from the prop wash.  At about 5 we were ready to call it with no fish on the boat and a few misses.  We were in about 40 ft of water right off of Mt Baldy at the time.  I decided to cycle one of the riggers cycle between 18 -10 feet every 15 seconds.  Rod popped right as the rigger stopped cycling at the full up position.  Small 6lb King.  Finally a fish in the boat! 

After that we ran everything up to the top of the 20 ft of the water column.  I changed out the mag dipseys to small deeper divers and put spoons on those about 60 back to try and put them in 15 ft.  Didn't get another hit unfortunately.

Got to play around with setting rods quite a bit though and manged to get the zig zag pattern on my autopilot to a usable setting. Kept a 2.2 - 2.5 speed at ball most of the day, which was about 2.7 at the surface (Fish Hawk).  Hoping that I can get the last of the engine gremlins cleared out so I feel confident enough to go offshore with the boat.  Until then, I'll keep trying in close I suppose.

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