Another East Wind Day

A last minute cancellation opened the door for Justin and his friends to head out on the water this morning. We had talked and they were wondering if they would catch anything, as they’ve had bad experiences in the past. Hard to believe in this day and age! I assured him that whatever the weather would throw at us, they would have the time of their lives. Lately I haven’t had any game plan ready and have been making decisions on the fly. The weather has been so crazy that planning on where to go & what to do doesn’t seem to work out. I now make decisions when I arrive at the ramp in the morning! Today was no different as the winds were blowing big again and from the east, eliminating many places I had hoped to fish. I told everyone that we were making a long run and would be trolling to start the day. They didn’t seem to mind, they just wanted to catch fish! The two & three footers may have been a little bumpy getting across the lake but it was much calmer now where we were fishing. I set the lines in a deeper area and awaited our first rip. Although it didn’t come as quickly as I had hoped, it really didn’t take that long. Within the first 10 minutes someone was tight to a decent northern and things were starting to look up. I had four guys in the boat and I wanted to make sure that everyone landed plenty of fish. Their last trip was on Magog and it wasn’t very memorable! It was however quite expensive! Justin, Alex, Danny & Steven would hopefully be remembering this trip for much better reasons! As I continued the troll I realized that the fish were incredibly inactive and I knew it was going to be a grind. Most of the hits were springtime like and I had to throttle down on almost every one of them. I fished a lot of water and found areas that were holding plenty of good walleye & pike and covered it thoroughly. Many fish were landed and even a couple of doubles were had as well. At one point, while on the phone with a potential customer, we even managed a triple! This turned out to be a great selling feature as she booked up shortly after. We were only going to be out for the morning so I really didn’t want to leave fish now that I found them and remained in this area for most of the time. If the water hadn’t have been 69 degrees, I’m sure they would have caught plenty more. We had great numbers of pike & walleye and some really good ones were landed as well. It was actually hard to get a keeper walleye as most were way over and had to be released!

I had left the last hour of the morning for some casting for bass & walleye and as difficult as it may have been, they still managed to catch a few fish. Justin landed a nice smallie and lost a mooneye, which doesn’t happen very often and Danny added another keeper eye to the tank. The others had follows that never managed to get pinned. By 12:15, we were done and I packed everything up for the run back to the dock.

These guys may have had bad experiences in the past but today wasn’t one of them! They had seen first hand what great fishing can be like by targeting a specific species and catching them. They not only caught plenty but some real quality as well. They even managed to take home 3 keeper walleye! Something tells me that this won’t be the last time we see each other. There’s already talk about a return trip for sturgeon later in the season and that should have them hooked for life!