These last couple Lake Erie Walleye Trail’s have been a game of zigs and zags. Huron Pro-Am last month, Jason and I, with our co-angler Jason, made a run to our first area and probably worked it too long. We ended up moving around and settled on some fish in the last 2 hours well away from our initial game plan and scraped together some quality fish to salvage a good finish at 7th/85. We had a great turnout for the kids clinic sponsored by the NPAA and Future Anglers Foundation. It’s always great to see the kids come out and show them the passion in our sport.
In the combined MWC/LEWT this past weekend, Jason was called to duty for a tuna tournament in the Bahamas, so I had to make the call to the bullpen for the one-sub-a-year we are aloud. It was an easy call, Lucas Hahn, LEWT legend, was ready and available. It was fun, we worked hard in practice and fished ALOT of water, learned a lot. The short fish on the south shoreline were mind numbing. We had a very difficult time patterning any descent sized fish. It was a ‘pulling out of the harbor’ call on tournament day, but we decide to make a run up into shallow rock structure in Canadian waters. It seemed the best average grade of fish with the least amount of nuisance short fish. Part of the problem was we hadn’t had a real giants, nor hadn’t heard of any giant from that area. But honestly we hadn’t had that anywhere, if we made the call to go giant fishing, it would have been based just on history, and that’s never really a good idea.It took a bit to locate them up there, but once we found them and put a program together (my favorite program of spinners and inline weights at slow speeds) it was on. Between 9-11:00 we put 8 fish in the boat that were seemingly all cookie cutter solid 5-5.5lbers. Then the bite somewhat slowed and we had to make the decision to stay and keep trying to upgrade 1/4lbs at a time or go elsewhere looking for a giant kicker fish. We made the decision to scramble and try kicker fish programs elsewhere. It never happen. Hindsight, we should have just stayed and kept working that quality grade of fish. We still ended up with a solid finish at 16th/123 in the LEWT and 20th/78 in the MWC. We’re currently in the lead for the Team of the Year race, but have a long way to go. Its definitely something we have our eye on, but there is a long way to go, and our focus is on to the next! Jason will be back, thanks to Luke for the sub, let’s go in Ashtabula!!!
