Grand Haven Offshore Challenge 2025 -Day 1
Well the forecast cleaned up enough to feel like we could enter the Grand Haven Offshore challenge. We had a good time last year and high hopes we could improve upon our 7th place finish. It’s also more of an event that the family can get involved with vs the regularly scheduled bass tournaments. The girls insisted they go to the captains meeting on Thursday night and Grand Haven. That was kind of fun and we made out tournament game plan while closely watching the weather.
The forecast was bad but had been progressively getting better. The biggest problem with it was the direction of the wind. North and North West is a bad deal for out there in a small boat. It was going to be unpleasant but it looked like we would fish. I’m unfamiliar with how that all works with the salmon tournaments but we learned a lot about that this weekend. Ideally, we would go out deep but that forecast just wasn’t going to allow for it. We just had to survive the day and fish in more pleasant conditions on Sunday. Our team name changed this year from Girl Dad’s to Diver Dock. If you haven’t seen the Diver Dock, it is a cool product for organizing your divers/leaders for salmon fishing and makes them much less of a pain to deal with.
Wave conditions dictated that we were going to stay close in the mud and get what we could to start. 1 small fish in 3 passes and our high hopes led us to plan B. The bite has been out deeper and if we could get there, we could do some damage. So we went for it and it was a show, the bad kind of show. Knowing what we know now it was a huge mistake. We made it to 100 feet before enough was enough, every wave was another wall of water hitting us. Very grateful for my Blackfish insulated Stormskin bibs and wishing I had worn an insulated/waterproof top. That water was cold and dead but we worked it for a while. Running back to the mud and getting what we could was the play. We heard something unclear on the radio about 10:30 before we left.
We set down outside the mud (the mud refers to the dirty/warm water pouring out of the Grand River) and started working in. We also started checking around to see what this 10:30 announcement meant, hoping there would be some clarification on GHOC facebook page. That’s when we discovered we had a little time to get more fish vs a lot of time like we thought we had. This was bad news for us and had we known the tournament was shortened to 10:30 or that it was likely to happen when the Port Sheldon Buoy got to 3 feet, we would have stayed in the mud the whole time. It was just one of those days that everything was against us. We did pick up one more fish with a quick tackle adjustment but it just wasn’t enough time. Our day could have been completely different if we just would have gotten 1 more bite in our first couple passes or were just more salmon tournament savvy. But that is part of the learning curve especially with a 22 foot boat.
The only positive is we could get some rest and then come back down to Grand Haven for the beer tent/live music. That was a lot of fun but also just so dang cold. We were all over the cold, it would be nice if it could get over 55 degrees in June right? It was a lot of fun though, and the activities in downtown Grand Haven are another thing that makes the salmon tournament weekends fun.
The good news is that there was no where to go but up. I think we were in 27th out of 37 boats after day 1. The salmon tournament point system means you could make a big jump if you could just get your 10 fish limit. We felt really confident we could get our 7 salmon with Sundays better conditions but could we get the 3 trout we needed to get to 10? If it all worked out, I think it would be enough to get paid and salvage the event.