Elk Rapids 6-11

[FBD]

Hit Traverse Bay for the 4th time.  First three trips, no fish.

Was hoping to get my youngest a master angler cisco as they are apparently just jump in the boat easy to catch.

Pull into Elk Rapids, find the launch.  But no, there's a wooden boat show, so the launch is closed until 9:30 to allow the wooden boats to do wooden boat stuff.  Not a wooden boat in sight.  Guy gets kind of jerky with me, so I point out we should have brought the '56 Barracuda instead of the '94 Sea Nymph, and that grandpa was a foreman at the Aniline Road Chris Craft Plant.  Then we were friends.  So we launch.

Only to figure out we are upstream from the dam.  Wrong launch.  

Walk back to get the trailer, put the boat back on it (no wooden boats in sight) and go and find the other launch.  My wife explains things to them and they laugh an give us a permit without paying as we paid at the other launch, which was fine, as we actually launched.

Head out to 65' which the drop off makes our heads spin.  We're Holland flatlanders, 25' of drop per mile, not 50' of drop in seconds.  Set up on marks.  Troll out of marks, troll back into marks.  Set up a flat line, 1 color, 5 and 7 colors, two slide divers and two riggers.  Only one tangle.

One color goes off, good fish, gets into the 7 color and is gone.  Then it goes again, small laker we release.  And again.  Same.  Surmising the lakers are picking off the dying alewives up top, I yank the 5 and 7 colors (never mind all the marks 25-40' down) and put out more flat lines.  With thin fish.  And rapalas.  You can't mimic alewives much better than that.  And we get one more hit and it's 60' down on a rigger.

Marks dry up.

Head into the rocks to look for cisco / browns / bass, troll around in 12' for half an hour until we find a piling that grabs a diver.  Pull the other lines, come back to it to untangle it.  Kid bails over in the mean time and goes swimming.  Get the diver untangled, pick the kid back up, and call it a day.

The cisco hunt will resume come October...

[zgrinder on Fin Warrior]

I laughed so hard I cried.  Great post

[FBD]

My wife said the look on my face when I realized we were upstream from the dam on the river was absolutely priceless.

We did manage a 23" master angler cicso by wrestling it from a very determined sea gull on the beach, but being a quasi legal method of procurement we decided not to enter it.  And the fact that half the head and gills were pecked away probably would have showed up in the picture you have to submit...