Muskegon Lake HOTD - Practice

This was a tricky week for practice. Amanda was gone on a work trip so I had both pick up and drop off duties. That meant overall it would be a shorter practice day than I’d like and also, I was going to miss that window of early activity. I feel like that early window can be so critical for practice especially if you are just looking for areas with life. All that was a lot less complicated than what was coming for Saturday. We had winds, big winds, 40mph gust out of the SW winds. That is the absolute worst wind direction we could possibly have. When it blows out of the SW like that the entire lake is rough.

Lots of the lake was going to be unfishable and I was going to spend some time looking for places that I could effectively fish in the event. But I was also going to just stay away from a lot of spots that would be fishable and I was going to go to anyway. Throw in the fact that I had yet to make a lap around the lake and I had a lot to cover. Even though I had this tournament for the weekend I still wanted to just get an overall look at the lake for the rest of the season.

I discovered that I did not like the weeds most places and it seemed like neither did the bass. A few areas I hoped would be sneaky were also unproductive and finding new places that would be fishable was a waste. I did get one big largemouth that gave me a little hope but I also knew it was likely a fluke catch. My only other big bite of the day was a big smallmouth off something new and juicy but would be very unfishable on Saturday. I tried a lot of different stuff, grass, hard cover, fishing slow, fishing fast, and at the very best just eliminated some water.

It was an awfully discouraging day as even 2 pounders were not easy to come by for me. That being said, I was more experimenting than really pressing things. I had a lot of confidence in some water that would be calm on Saturday. So, despite only catching 14ish pounds on Thursday, I was expecting a good bag of largemouths come tournament day.