Saginaw Bay, Au Gres, 6/18 & 6/19/08

All I can say is WOW. The fishing is exploding now with more and bigger fish. As I ran out yesterday the wind steadily picked up until I got out six miles and set lines in a 25-30 mph NW wind. It blew hard for an hour, and then it died down sharply. The netters have set a bunch of nets now off Pt. Au Gres. They are in 26-30 feet of water about 3.5 miles S. of the Au Gres River jetties. I saw four different nets there. I ran through them yesterday and set up near the next set of nets in 23 feet of water and trolled with the wind out towards deeper water. We didn’t get a bit for about 30 minutes, but when we zigzagged past the last net, we started hitting fish. I had a guy follow me out from the launch and he didn’t see the net I was zigging around, and he got caught in it. Be careful are a lot of those nets that were just moved are not well marked. In fact they are illegally marked and I took photos and waypoints today and plan to turn them in as there is not excuse for not having a hi-visibility flag on the staffs as the law stipulates. Anyway, we caught fish at a rate of 10 keepers per hour yesterday taking some real nice fish and also the first Saginaw Bay sheephead of the year. We trolled out to 30 feet of water and that was it for the day. Today we went out to the same area, but set up on the south side of the nets in 23 feet of water and trolled out. It was non-stop action all morning. My customers wanted to keep only fish over 20” and it only took us two hours of fishing to put 15 that size in the box. We also took several jumbo walleye that were released along with probably 10 fish that were 15-20” and another 5 that were sub-legal. One was over 10 pounds. The hot program has been Moonshine Walleye Spoons fished as close to bottom as possible using Jet Divers. As I troll deeper, I reset the setbacks to keep them where the fish are. Red Grape and Glow Purple Nose have been awesome, but I had good success today with a few new patterns. I don’t have a Moonshine Spoon charter with me and will have to look up on the Internet and report the names at a later date. I only ran six lines today and had two Hot N’ Tots on the outside boards and spoons off the middle and inside boards. The spoons out fished the Tots by about 5:1 today, but the Tots’ did take plenty of fish too so I left them in the water for variety.

Capt. Mike Veine
http://www.trophyspecialists.com