6/28/15, Saginaw Bay, Au Gres, Fishing Report

My clients had their trip cancelled due to bad weather back during the spring, but they rescheduled for today. With winds at 25 knots out of the northeast yesterday, we had to cancel that charter. Those big winds continued through last night and into the early morning hours. A couple hours before the start of today's charter, the wind switched to the northwest, so we had wind and big rollers from two different directions. We stayed close to shore for protection from the waves and found a small school of fish in 23 to 28 feet of water. We caught a fair number of walleyes, but when the wind shifted to the northeast the bite slowed up to a crawl. After a while though, they started biting again, but when the wind shifted once again, but to the east, the walleye bite died, but by then my clients had caught their limits of nice walleyes. I decided to scout out a different area on my limit for tomorrow's charter and set up for a reconnaissance trolling pass in 42 feet of water just west of the weather buoy. The bite was slow there too, but we did manage some more walleyes and two of them were pretty big ones. We only caught a couple walleyes today that were under 18" with our biggest being a 26 incher. We also lost several 25 inch-ish walleyes too, so there were some nice sized fish in the area. The bite though was painfully tough despite the fact that I was marking fish where ever we went. The light bite resulted in us loosing more fish than we caught. All but one of our walleyes came right off the bottom on spinner/crawler/bottom bouncer rigs. We had to keep the speeds slow at 1.3-1.4 mph to get them to bite. Color did not seem to mater as they hit everything about equally. The weather this June has been very unstable, but we do have a good forecast for tomorrow. Hopefully July will bring more stable weather. If so, the fishing here will explode.

Capt. Mike Veine

6/28/15, Saginaw Bay, Au Gres, Fishing Report