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With the help of a fellow musky hunter friend of mine, I think we are ready to attack St. Clair next week with a high level of confidence. My friend "Horseshoe Man" and I will drag my buddies Lund north of Detroit to cast our buns off for 5 days. Hopefully, this trip will get me re-acclimated with the feel of catching some big muskies after this horrible summer of chasing them here on the Allegheny.
I might even go as far as to update our mission each day via Twitter but don't count on it. :)
What are you going to use for throwing blades this year? I've heard a lot of good things about the Tranx except that it doesn't come in lefty... bummer.
I still like the Luna for blades especially since I am going to downsize a tad bit and throw some newly made #8's in both singles and doubles. They are heavier than most rigs on the market and I really like them for deeper weeds while maintaining good speed. These blades are made by one of my new tackle sponsors called Waterbeast Lures out of MN. www.waterbeastbucktails.com
Hopefully, we will have some pics of the fish chowing down on them soon.
Well, we are back and had my first day of teacher meeting stuff today. I finally had a chance to dowload a few of our largest fish pictures and give a synopsis of the trip.
We had some brutal fishing conditions and according to the local guides in the Anchor Bay area, the bite had been tough. (At this point I am thinking we could have stayed in PA and grinded out a few tough days instead of driving to Detroit.) Anyway, we rose our first fish on the 4th cast and hooked our first fish on the 16th cast but lost it. Then we lost another and another and another and another and another and another then we hit 2 in a row on very lengthy fig-8's. The fish were just nipping our bucktails.......very non-committal. We did not see anything over 41" the first day. Day 2 more of the same but I did manage a nice mid-40's fish in some thick slop......so we fished the slop for another 1.5 days and kept losing fish after fish after fish. I decided to open up our hook gaps a little that nite to see if that would help and it did (eventually).
Day 3 had us moving away from all those actions spots we had found and moved to deeper water to see if we could find larger fish and within the first 20 minutes we had raised 2-3 fish in the 45-50 inch bracket and then I whacked a really nice fish that jumped and threw my bucktail. My buddy had the same thing happen to him minutes later. We proceeded to hook another 4-5 fish that just nipped the bucktails, we set the hook and then they would still shake off after a couple headshakes. Day 3 is over with a few smaller fish in the net (actually water released with pics of baits in mouths), 4-5 super nice fish followed us to boat and 2 other large fish jumping and throwing our baits within the first 5 seconds of being hooked plus about 8-10 other "nips". It was amazing to see how many fish could actually bite our bucktails without even getting the points in their gums. We could see them blast off from the deeper, thicker weeds like a missle up to our baits and nip them and return to the slop in 1.5 seconds......really cool stuff but frustrating at the same time. We knew we were on lots of nice fish but other than dropping suckers overboard, we had no solution. I tried big rubber, small rubber, softail Leo's (which Dave rose 2 nice fish on them but they still would not eat it), Shallow Invaders burned back to boat and twitched, Mantas, Phantoms, and smaller bucktails, of course. Nothing would change their temperment.
Day 4 had a big weather change over nite but was only going to last until around 11am so we hustled out to our big fish spots with high confidence. We both thought it was going to take a weather change for these fish to actually commit and hammer our stuff.....and they did just that. We went 2 for 3 in a 20 minute window and had the largest fish of the trip follow deep but I just could not get her to go into the first turn so I had to watch her sink out of sight. As soon as the clouds moved out on Monday we could tell the big fish went dormant. We caught a few more smaller fish before moonrise and saw nothing during the 2-hour moonset timeframe. We packed up and headed to hotel with ice packs on our wrists and elbows. :)
All I can say is that those larger, spotted muskies loved to jump and would peel line off my cranked down drag like I had a snoopy rod. Did I say they loved to jump? Well, they did in a big way even with rod tips in the water.
Here are pictures of the 3 largest fish (and the only 3 fish we netted for pics) of our trip.
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I like that last photo. Sounds like the action was non-stop out there.
The action went in spurts. We fished as hard as we could pulling these Waterbeast blades and during the first 3.5 days, the action went in spurts. Things would be dead for an hour or so and then we would hook/see 2-5 fish and then it would be over in 15 minutes. The fastest cranking got most of the action until the front moved in and then it did not make much difference. I had not pulled blades at all since mid-June when the bite went bad here on the river so I struggled with the 12-hour days pulling them non-stop.
We only fished past 7pm on the very first half-day we were there and after losing 3 quarts of blood to the mosquitoes coupled with the absolutely crazy boat driving out there (I thought I was on Raystown during a weekend), we stuck with the 6am to 6pm shift the rest of the time.
I would have loved to have seen what we could have done with a full day of overcast and wind. :)