First St. Clair Trip

[John Pensyl]

For those who haven't experienced it first hand St. Clair is amazing, the trolling game is comparable to our brown trout fishery on lake ontario.  You might spend some time finding fish but when you do your rods will fire 7 times in an hour, its crazy (no exaggeration, it happened).  Most boats out there trolling are putting up 10-20 fish per day no problem and even just going out with 4 rods short lining deep bakers and musky rockets for a couple hrs a couple times while we were there we saw plenty of action.  Even got a couple fish on the baby perch bait I won last week at the monthly meeting!  lol.  

Casting without being confidant in open water can be tough but we did manage to have some success.  Its intimidating running 6 miles offshore to cast pounders in the middle of nowhere at the end of the bell river hump.   Biggest fish casting was a 43 on a pounder out in front of the Detroit.    Our best non trolling action came jigging ROB's in the Detroit.  We figured it out pretty fast and put some nice fish in the boat including our biggest from the trip, Cullen with a nice 47" 3 hours in on the first day in an area that nobody else fished the whole time we were there.  We put on enough of a show that I did about $120 in tube sales in the parking lot one day.  John Bondy's clients were very nice and always congratulated us on our catches when they passed our deployed beckman, eventually they gave up and bass fished. : )  Those fish were fiends for the tube...

Today we ran 2 miles off shore, trolled for an hour at 4.5 mph until we found fish and hit 3 fish in 20 minutes.  After releasing the 3rd fish, (nice 44") waves had built to solid 4 footers with the occasional 6 out of nowhere.  We had to stand the boat up and take a beating for 7 miles back to the bell river marina.  Stuffed the bow twice, soaked ourselves head to toe but the new boat was amazing.  Tracker would have been at the bottom of the lake.

Water temps were still 65 deg so we were way too early for the big fish fall casting bite we hoped for, but experiencing the bell river marina and how hot that trolling action is was pretty cool.  Definitely something anybody who likes to troll needs to experience first hand.

[Scott McKee]

Thank God for the new whip, huh John?  Great report!  Please shoot me a bunch of pictures (and even expand on the report if you have time), I'd like to include this in the next rag.  Thanks.

[Jay Nannen]

Sounds like a great trip John.  Congrats!