With just a few days in left in the Lake Erie Spring Fling Walleye Derby, Paul Rogers (my MWC teammate) is leading with this 12.7lb beast. The Spring Fling is a month long derby on Erie in which over 100 anglers look for the largest fish during at 4 week period through most of May. 3,600$ in prize money will be divided up amongst the top 5 anglers with the top prize being $2000! Paul and I are keeping our fingers crossed that his fish holds up before the derby is finished this Sunday morning the 27th at 6am.
Paul, being an out of stater, wasn’t sure about entering the derby, but being that we were going to be fishing every day during the week of the Huron MWC, we figured why not? On our first day of prefish, we decided to fish out of Lorain as we had heard there were some big fish in the area. We set up in 38 fow off Beaver Park, and 15 minut
es into our day, a dipsy set 45′ back on a #2 setting with a copper double willow went off. After the fish pulled 30 feet of line and gave a few thunderous head shakes, we knew we were hooked onto a big fish. I slowed the boat a touch, and Paul eased the fish up that wanted nothing to do with coming to the surface. When I caught first glimpse of the fish, I instantly thought “derby fish”, quickly grabbed the net (we usually don’t net fish prefishing), and scooped the fish as Paul eased it to the surface right off the back of the boat.
As soon as the fish hit the floor of the the boat, I thought “game over” for the derby. I thought the fish was bigger than the 12.7lbs when it hit the scales, bu
t it is still a monstrous fish that will be tough to beat this time of year.
Throughout the week, we fish all over from the Islands all the way to Avon Point. We had a more consistent bite going on near the islands, Kelley’s in particular, but were catching and hearing reports of monster bags to the East between Lorain and Avon Lake. The problem was that a lot of the fish to the East were migratory fish that were there on day, and gone the next. So on game day, we decided to head to Kelley’s Shoal as we were consistently on nice fish. Right off the bat, we boxed a 9lber on a bottom bouncer. In prefish, most of our bigger fish near Kelley’s came on bottom bouncers or dipsys near the bottom, with more numbers coming on higher presentations. We started catching more fish and kept moving our presentation higher (mistake #1). We should have never abandoned our big fish bottom presentation. White back blades with purple on the front was best in the morning, and copper with purple was best in the afternoon. We ended up with a nice bag of 34lbs day one, 
but it just wasn’t enough as much of the field put the smack down on them as well. On day 2, we decided to swing for the fences, and head East in search of some big girls to help us make up ground. Using our Lowrance electronics, we found some nice pods of fish off Beaver near where we caught our derby fish. This day was a 2 oz 32′ back day. Orange and Chartreuse blades were best. The problem was, we just caught a bunch of nice fish in the 7lb range, no real kicker fish. We needed a couple 9 or 10lbers.
It turned out that most of the big bags from the tournament came from Kelly’s Shoal, and on or near the bottom. The same program we had success with in prefish, and caught our first nice fish of the tournament. We probably should have stuck it out, and gone back there day 2, as we knew a lot of the big day 1 bags had come from there. Oh well, woulda, coulda, shoulda… We ended up with 69lbs over 2 days that put us in 28th place out 80 boats, not bad, but certainly not what we hope for fishing a tournament in our back yard. But hey, we had a great time, learned some lessons, and are sitting in first place in the Derby with 3 days left to go!
