The Big Blow

I fished with Dave & Jeff today on a local lake for smallies, and tried a little Muskie action as well. To say it was a tough day would have been an understatement! We began the day with sunshine and a 10 to 15 know wind from the SW and tried trolling for a while to see if we couldn’t hook up with a toothy critter. This apparently wasn’t going to happen and we switched to bass after a couple of hours of washing lures! It didn’t take Dave long to hook up with a nice smallie around 4 pounds, but this was to prove to be the only one landed in this area. There were a couple of other hits and one other fish briefly on, but nothing came to net. By now the winds had intensified and I thought I would try an area fully exposed to the elements of Mother Nature before it got too bad. We threw spinnerbaits, jerk-baits and tubes to these fish but had limited success here as well. Jeff managed to get into a few fish on a spinnerbait, but nothing to write home about. We did manage to see several large smallies roaming around and this made it all that much more frustrating as they wouldn’t bite. With the increase in wind to 25 or 30 knots, the boat control became a little more difficult and eventually we gave up on this area all together and changed back to Muskie trolling. By now the conditions were 3 to 4 footers with an occasional 5 footer thrown in for good measure and even the trolling was difficult. I had to resort to using the big motor just to get the speed up enough to control the troll. I marked plenty of baitfish as well as large fish and really thought we would score, but this wasn’t to be the case. We trolled around for a couple more hours in several places marking huge hooks on the sonar, but no cooperation on the part of the fish. Eventually we decided to try one last attempt at smallies and hit another area on the way in. Dave had a shot at one good fish, but unfortunately it came unpinned shortly after hook up and that was all they wrote. By 4:00 PM we had enough and headed back to the boat launch as they had to get back early for an evening hockey game in Montreal. Tough bite today!