Desperate Times
One of the best things about being in a place where it takes some real cold to make ice. Is that if you don't get that cold, the in between stage is pretty short. Or maybe there isn't one at all. We've got boats, we've got piers, and we've got open water. While none of that's ideal we might as well make the most of it.
The pier deal is unique and you just need a couple things to line up to make it an option. Wind is a big one although in places with “outer arms” like Muskegon it is much less of a big deal. However if you want to be casting into lake Michigan itself you'll need a window where waves aren't washing up and over the piers. The other issue is ice, when we do get cold weather the piers can get covered in feet of ice. The outer piers still have feet of ice on them right now in Muskegon even after all the warm weather. The ice often makes it dangerous or impossible to fish or land a fish. There also can be too much ice flowing around to make a cast. But since there wasn’t much ice on the Great Lakes this year that has only been a problem for about a week.
But if it does line up, it can be really fun. Often you aren't going to get a lot of bites but the mystery of not knowing what's on the end of the line is exciting (it only gets better as the water warms). Spoons, blade baits, Tikka minos, jig/plastic, and crank baits are just some of the things I throw. You can certainly soak some spawn too but I've never played that game. I've landed browns, Lakers, whitefish, and walleyes all while standing on the concrete this year.
Boats are the preferred option though. Trevor and I got real desperate and drug the 9 footer across the ice on Muskegon Lake to some open water. It wasn't the right time of the year to have much perch success but we had to try. It was a perch ghost town but Trevor landed a nice pike out of 40 feet of water. That has worked in the past for me but it needs to get late enough in the year where the Lake Michigan perch are starting to come back out of Muskegon Lake.
The next adventure was really an exciting one for me. I've been slowly setting the duck boat up to do some trolling. We got a weekend where the Grand River opened up and there were calm seas. It was going to be a dual purpose mission. Attempt to go perching and then troll for whatever bites. We had low expectations but at least the forecast would allow us to try.
The perching was a true experiment since that is much more spot dependent. We accomplished 2 goals there, find the perch and find a burbot. The only problem is neither of them bit. You can see a picture of that burbot slowly swimming through on my Humminbird below. It had taken some time to find a good school of perch and it was obvious after sitting on top of them for half an hour that there was no point in playing that game.
We started putting trolling rods in and heading towards shallower water. We could run a 5 rod spread on my boat and only got 3 of them out before our first bite. It was on a diver with a Jagerbomb stinger spoon and the skunk was out of the boat. I will say this fish caused us to chase around another bite in that deeper water for too long. But since we got the skunk out of the boat it was a successful day. Our next bite gave us a little better clue of what was going on. That fish was suspended about 15 feet down over 30 feet of water and spit us some sort of baitfish on the way in. We would later determine that these lakers were feeding on shad. Shortly after we got a bite on a flat line over 20 feet of water and it really let us know that these fish were using the water column. We ended up going 5 for 7 and caught them progressively shallower and shallower. I’d have liked to seen one of the fish we lost as it had so much pressure on that Traver couldn’t get the rod out of the rod holder. One thing that became apparent was using bass rods and reels for the flat lines was insufficient. One of the lakers drug a board so far back before we noticed that there was just a few wraps of line left before the backing. A quick call to ClearH2O Tackle the next day and some line counters were on the way. Not only is having the line counter important but so is the clicking of the drag when a fish takes a rod running a planer board.
I hope to get back out there soon and learn some more stuff about all that as it really was fun. There are about 100 different things going on that I want to try right now and a lot of them involve lake Michigan. It’s not that I don’t want to go drop a blade bait on some ice out bass but there just isn’t as much adventure or mystery to it for me. Maybe some new lakes might excite that but I really enjoy exploring as much as I can when the water is cold. It also doesn’t help that I don’t have room for 2 boats at the same time at my house and if I’m going bass fishing right now I really want to be working on my MEGA Live game. So until I have the Nitro home I can’t say I’ll be super motivated to go bass fishing but who knows. Looking forward to one day when we hopefully have enough space to have it all ready to go at the same time. Until then we are going to keep exploring and hope that next year at this time I’ll be writing about ice fishing instead.