Pentwater 7/30 am, 0 for 1

[Mega Byte]

Monday was a rough morning.  First skunk of the year.  I didn't check the exact time, but I think we had our 6 lines set around 6:45 and we fished until 2.  We started just north of the dunes in 80 FOW and were marking a lot of big arches right away.  On the graph, it appeared like the bottom 10 feed was covered in bait with arches all around.  No takers though.  By the time we had made it just off the dunes, the arches and bait were gone.  Very shortly after that, in 97 FOW we took a big rip on a wire diver, Kevin's GF spin doctor and meat rig.  It was down 80'.  He made a quick run and then gave two big head bangs and he was off.  

We decided to circle back around and try and run through all those marks of fish that we just came through.  On this pass through, they were gone.  So we turned south looking for fish and we worked out to deeper water.  We spent the next 7 hours looking for fish and changing baits.  We worked water all the way out to 185 feet.  We were getting some decent marks between 75 and 110 foot down and we had a variety of baits down there.  I had heard the fishing was good south of the point, so we headed south, but by the time we got south of the point, it was almost noon.  We did find more marks in 160 FOW, down around 100 feet, but no hits.

One thing we did on this trip was focus on the king bite, so we didn't have any lines up high in the warmer water.  We had 50-degree water 100 feet down.  By the end of the day, we had a lot of meat rigs out since that was what I was hearing was working and that was our only hit of the day.  Maybe we had bad meat?  It smelled fine, but it wasn't freshly purchased.

We pulled lines around 2 PM.  On the cruise back to port we noticed the surface temp was 2 degrees cooler just north of the dunes.  It warmed a bit when we got closer to port.

The lake was smooth and the weather was great and I got to spend a lot of time with my father, so despite the lack of fish, it was a good trip.

[Reel-Deal]

Yep - pretty much the exact same for us out of Muskegon - lines set by 6:00 AM - started in 70 FOW with TONS of marks and bait - everywhere! No takers - slide out north about 8:45 AM as the marks evaporated - found some active fish at the point about 300 FOW - good temps - scattered marks and bait - took a huge rip on the high 100' CU with double orange crush - gone after a few minutes...

10 minutes later - 250 CU goes with a large fish - ran like a big king - and broke off 30# test as he took most of my backing...that was it!!!