Member
Posts: 2680
Location: Essexville, MI./Saginaw Bay. | Just wonder how many of you plan your special fishing trips the same time every year? Kinda like the guy who sets on the same stump for 30 years becasue he got a big buck there in 1946, often I find that being there on the same day I nailed them is often my idea and not always the fishes.
Lets face it, even though many of mother natures seasonal changes occur within the same time frame each year, other natural variables can often move things back or ahead by weeks at certain times. So does anybody actually wait and see what transpires as the time draws near, or just poke and hope?
And better yet, how many actually understand and recognize why they are having the bad luck, when for 10 years in a row you hammered them during this time frame? What conditions have you found make things change the most besides the high and low pressure systems? |
Location: Rhinelander | The trip I live all winter for is to Wabigoon Lake, up by Dryden, Ontario. I take that trip the same time every year so I can stretch my vacation, during the week of the Fourth of July. I've been taking this trip now for well over 20 years, and have had good, great, unbelievable, and awful fishing.
Wabigoon is a flowage, and is relatively 'new'. The system was dammed up in a clay basin, so the water clarity is poor on good days. If the wind really blows or it rains very hard, the mudlines can be as thick as soup at times. That creates a need to adjust, but doesn't really effect the bite all that much.
The killer is very high water that is above the cabbage, dropping all week(sometimes a foot a day). The fish move into the current, and are difficult to find and scattered. Trolling doesn't seem to help much, either. All I have ever been able to do under those conditions is fish EVERYWHERE, picking a couple off each structure. Muskies are very tough under these conditions, and big pike even tougher. Soon as the water level stabilizes, so does the fishing.I have lost an entire week there to high water and big rains, but refuse to move to another lake because of my primary target on the Goon; huge Great Lakes Strain muskies.
I am very aware of conditions all the time I am on the water, down to little subtle things like the leaves showing their bottom sides halfway through the day or their top sides if that was the case, birds suddenly active, small wind shifts, changes in the light conditions,certain clouds forming on the horizon, and more seasonal things like tullibe location, where the emerald shiners seem to be,insect hatches, water temps in the current VS the current breaks and backs of the bays,weed growth quality and depth, etc. There are HUGE (I MEAN HUGE) walleyes in the Goon in numbers. I watched for several years as the Ministry fyke netted for pike and muskies, and tossed 30 to 36" eyes out of the nets like so many hunks of firewood. It would be really cool to get a few of the WalleyeFIRST participants to go there with the MuskieFIRST folks this Summer for the scheduled outing to teach me how to catch those fish with some form of consistency.
I take the dates up there because of my job (I sell boats for a living) as the Fourth is a bad week to even try to get near a dealer because of the Holiday. One of these fine years I will take TWO weeks up there and lessen the conditional effect! |
