Spring Lake 10-22-26
The pull of hunting season is hard at this time of year but there is so much good fishing to be had. It’s hard to ignore a few extra days on the lake when the weather has been so nice. The girls have been mentioning a pike all summer long and it seemed like this might be a great time to give it a shot. School nights and daylight make it hard to get trips in, life is just busy! But we decided on an exploratory Spring Lake trip to try and get a pike. I’d have much rather tried Muskegon but at the very least we’d learn something.
One of the girls ended up sick that day so my crew members went down to 2. The nice thing about this time of year is you can actually use the Petty’s Bayou launch without too much fear of being held up by inexperienced “boat launchers”. We put the Minn Kota down and started trolling right away. We had an east wind and a lot of floating celery that was making things difficult. So we headed towards the other side of the lake. Most of the trolling stuff is still on the salmon boat so we had a skeleton crew of gear and boats. A couple flat lines with bandits out deep, a flicker minnow directly behind the boat, and a 1.5 color with a spoon going directly along the shallow break. The celery would make it tough with this rod but it ended up getting a couple bites. I also recently purchased the Summit Fishing transducer mount and pole so we had my Mega Live 2 going. That was really helpful and it worked fine trolling as long as I positioned the pole so it was against the side of the boat. We weren’t going fast but everything seemed fined up to 3mph (we caught our fish at around 2mph).
Once we got settled on the celery free side, the 1.5 color took a violent bite and we had a fish on. Mabel had the rod and she landed her first ever pike. 2 minutes after putting it back down and it goes again. This time a nice drum for Millie and she was owning it. I did not expect her to be able to do all the reeling after our salmon adventure the summer (she’s 4) but she handled the trolling reel with ease. I was also surprised to catch a drum in the cooler water as they usually shut down when the water is cold.
Things were quiet for a bit but we were having fun. Some sailboat traffic forced us to turn back around and shortly after I heard a splash and it was a solid largemouth jumping with the flicker minnow in it’s mouth. Another board went dragging back and both girls were hooked up. The 2nd bite came on a deep bandit (in pink). Millie rocked it again and we had a largemouth and a catfish in the boat at the same time. We fished a little bit longer, worked on some boat driving, and called it a successful night.
It was a great trip for us and I think if someone put a more serious approach in they could dial it in. Just catching 4 different species was cool for the girls so if you are on the fence about making another trip or not, it might be worth looking into.