Hey, WE ARE HOME !!! and it FEELS GREAT !!! "The Trophy" and I finished up our two month stint at the western basin on Sunday of the Memorial Day weekend and even though fishing for us was finally really good that weekend, I couldn't wait to get out of Dodge ! After dropping off my crew and their fish and topping off the fuel tank, I pulled out of Port Clinton exactly at 3:00pm. And with a threatening strong line of severe thunderstorms hot on my tail, we put the new engines that we re-powered the boat with over the winter to a real test ! I normally don't run that hot coming home but as I watched the line of storms gaining on me on my Raymarines live Doppler radar display, we pushed it pretty hard. The last 20 miles was pretty much balls to the wall and amongst the lightning bolts striking everywhere on the horizon, we safely pulled into Ashtabula Harbor exactly at 8:00pm with no time to spare. We just got the boat tied up and "crap" hit the proverbial fan ! YIKES ! Never a dull moment !
With 4 trips under my belt back home here already, I am pretty pleased with what I am seeing thus far. And the Walleyes we are catching are HUGE ! I mean really really big ! Of the fish that we have caught already, we've had 6 Walleyes of 29 inches or better. Saturday we had a 30 incher that went 10 1/2 pounds and on Sunday we had another 30 incher that topped the scales at 11 1/2 lbs ! Remarkable. And the others have been no slouches by no means either. Total numbers for 3 of the 4 trips that I have run thus far have been decent. Saturday I had a 4 person charter and we landed 14 and on Sunday I had a 2 man trip and we caught 13 monsters easily and back at the dock by 11am. I almost forgot what it was like too have an early quit ! We did have 1 bad day however on Friday with hardly any fish but I was still in the hunting mode at that point looking for the fish. And with not much help out there yet, there's a whole lot of water out there when you are looking for pockets of fish all by yourself. Such is fishing...
Most of the fish are coming on the typical spring/ early summer set ups. Planer boards with the 40 Jet Divers. I have now switched over to the new Tru Trip 40's and am pretty impressed with this new diver. It also seems to dive much deeper then the old Jenson jets with a noticeable steeper angle of decent into the water. They also pull harder. It is very sweet how they trip out and clear all the other lines. Even an extreme outside board line can be reeled in almost immediately as it goes off rather then have to wait for the fish and line to swing back. Nice ! Everything else is same old same old. Today we had an extremely strong big Dipsy diver day with maybe half of our fish coming on the big Divers. We have been having a bit of a problem with lots of little White Bass loading up on all the lines so for today I went to my big Gold Savant spoons in an attempt to cut back on dragging around these un-noticed little pests on the Dipsys. It did help there some but it also certainly attracted our biggest Walleyes as well ! A win win situation. At least today it did. So if you're not catching anything for a good while, you better check your poles. Every time we do, about half of them are loaded. Sure hope this problem goes away. Hopefully it will when we work our way out to deeper water which will probably be right around the corner.
So I have a good schedule, weather looks good for the next week and they have finally taken me off of suicide watch ! Hopefully this springs horrendous weather and tougher then tough fishing will soon be a distant memory. I don't look for as many limits this year simply because we just have not had any really great spawns since 03 but those surviving old fish from that monster hatch just keep getting bigger and bigger ! Couple of things that need to be mentioned. One is that it is imperative that we get out early. These fish most of the time feed like crazy right at dawn and then really shut down when the sun gets higher. I am at the boat at 5:00am everyday and we need to be off the dock by 5:30am at the VERY LATEST ! For all of my upcoming trips, I urge you to be there as early as possible so we don't miss out on this opportunity. Also there are no fishing license sales at the marina again this summer so you guys have to get them on your own ahead of time. You can do so online or the local K-Mart or Wal-Mart here in Ashtabula which both are open 24 hours a day. Well we'll see how how rest of this summer plays out but I think we are off to a pretty good start and just like Dorothy said, THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME ! I'm glad to be back !
Capt. Walt
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