7/24/2014, Saginaw Bay, Au Gres, Fishing Report

It's a good thing my customers booked an 8-hour charter today because the first five hour of the trip were extremely slow, but the last couple hours saw Saginaw Bay cough up over 20 nice walleyes. My customers were from Chelsea, Michigan today. In fact, some of them live less than a few miles from me, yet I had never met them before. The Chelsea crew brought along a fourth person from Ohio too. The morning started off with a lot more wind than was predicted. In fact, the wind really blew all day yesterday and last night too from the northeast. Right about the time we launched the wind shifted though to the northwest. We ran out in rollers from the NE with the wind blowing at about 15 knots from the NW. as we got out into the bay further though, the wind shifted more to the north. When I got to where I wanted to fish, the water temperature had dropped five degrees since Tuesday, so I motored south about a mile and the temp started to creep up, so we set lines there and started a long trolling pass heading south. We caught a couple walleyes right away, but then the action died right when the wind died down to almost dead calm. We then trolled for hours only taking a couple more walleyes. We did catch two jumbo smallmouth bass though. I measured the first one and it was 22" and likely weighed close to five-pounds. The second one might have been slightly smaller, but it too was a trophy class bass. Eventually, at about noon, the walleyes turned on and we had non-stop action until we filled a five man limit. The Hot N' Tots that produced so well on Tuesday did not take one walleye today, so I put out a spread of all spinner/crawler rigs fished near bottom using bottom bouncers to counteract the tough bite. The best color early was fire/tiger, but later they really went after silver spinners big time. Trolling speeds of 1.8 to 1.9 mph did most of the damage and the fish seemed to bite best when I was making turns on both the port and starboard sides. They are predicting a light southerly wind for tomorrow, so if that prediction comes true, the fishing should be outstanding. The fish we are catching are prime eating size fish in the 16 to 22 inch range, which make fine table fare. My customers today took part of their catch to H&H Bakery and Restaurant where they will enjoy a very fresh fish dinner.



Capt. Mike Veine

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