Calm seas twice in one week meant I got to get in the layout boat one day and go fishing another…if I got a good start on a flooring project at home. That certainly added to the motivation to stay up late at night and make good progress. The plan was to head out of Grand Haven on Cameron’s Ranger with a 4 man crew and see what happens. Our 4 man crew went to a 2 man crew overnight as 2 of the guys ended up getting super sick. It meant less rods but we were feeling pretty confident with a 6 rod spread. We were going to start with a mix of flat lines, short cores/coppers on boards, and target steelhead. If that didn’t work then we would put out more of a lake trout spread.

I think we got 3 or 4 of those lines in before the first one went and it was of course a thinfin bite (Brad’s Thinfish). We get that one in and the thinfin on the other side goes. Then a short copper went followed by the 3 color and so on. Just chaos, the best kind. We finally got some time to make the switch back south toward the pierhead and get the rest of the stuff in the water. We had a little lull on our first pass south of the piers. We basically worked 25-50 feet of water north and south of the pier all morning with 25-40 feet being the best.

We kept the first couple steelhead that came aboard, but it became was obvious that we were going to get a lot of bites today. So we started releasing fish that way we could keep the ones that had the hooks really deep and the healthy fish could go back. That strategy worked out well as we were one short of keeping our limit right until the very end and we got to release a bunch of healthy steelhead. The lack of other fish was really surprising as we expected some lakers to be around. They must have been shallower or deeper than where we were fishing. It also could have been that were were trolling around 3 mph most of the time. We did finally pick up one late in the morning on a 125 copper that was close to bumping bottom. One other mystery fish that could have been a big laker did come off after a long battle where it dunked the board. Action was just steady and we only had one double.

We did notice the bite getting further down in the water column as the day went on. We pulled a flat line and put a rigger down. That was surprisingly effective in that shallow water with a caramel dolphin stinger. Just about everything we had out took bites except a stickbait that we were running early. We ended our morning 14-21 which was a lot of fun with a 2 man crew! Thin fins, gold magic man super slim, gold rasta goose super slim, and a caramel dolphin stinger were our hottest baits. Things were working well so we did not do a whole lot of switching out throughout the morning.

I think we just got lucky that river conditions are holding those fish back and they are staging out there in big numbers. I can’t imagine it will last much longer before a lot of them shoot up the river. Although some are going to hang out there all winter. Once again, I found stomachs with young of year bloaters in these fish. That has been consistent in fish from GH, Port Sheldon, and Muskegon. There must be a big year class of bloaters hanging out nearshore in these ports and the steelhead are loving it.

This made up for the last couple slower trips. That Ranger of Cameron’s is a fishy boat for sure and a great platform for this cold water trolling. Hopefully there are a few more trips left this season.

Featured