Yesterday I went out for a few hours. The first hour I spent shaking down my “new” boat. A 21 foot VIP center console. It was an absolutely steal and once I’m done installing the bow mount trolling motor it’ll be a true fishing machine.
As for the fishing it was kinda slow. I alternated tossing musky baits, bucktails and some bodybaits, with throwing my fav rattlinRap.
Caught 6 or 8 1 pound largemouth and 1 northern pike. All on a 4 lbs ultra light set up! The pike was a blast!
When I got the pike in it had a bunch of sores on it. 2 big ones and 2 small ones. The big ones where still bleeding! Musky Bob suggested that the fresh sores where probably cause by lamprey. That makes a lot of sense because on smaller fish they do tend to fall of if you fight them for a while. Even with the wounds the pike was a good fighter so they don’t seem to be causing it extreme harm. It was still feeding & carrying on with normal life. Hopefully it will survive to become one of those huge gator pike that you find in the more northern lakes. It think it would be great to have LSC get know for large pike too! That would be a lot of fun!
It could also be from something larger and toothier decided it would be a nice snack.
Here is a pick of the pike.
Chewed up pike
I went out to lake st clair yesterday, got on the lake about 11:30 and headed for grass island on the north western side of anchor bay.
It was much brighter than the day before so I used a darker bucktail, brown with a copper blade. Working a drop off I drifted down it. About 3/4 of the way through the drift I had a 36 incher grab the bait about 15 foot from the boat. When I set the hook I jerked it right out of it’s mouth. 
Unfortunately that was the only musky on that drift.
I then headed over to the mouth of the north channel and drifted carlwers to see if there was anything hanging around. didn’t catch anything so I headed to a point at the north tip of anchor bay and drifted an edge there. Again I tossed a dark bucktail, black with a chartruse blade. The wind really picked up and was blowing me along a a good 1 mph clip. I got 2 hits but didn’t manage to hook anything. I’m beginning to think it’s time to sharpen my hooks again!
Since I got nothing there I headed over to the salt river area and drifted slowly south. After tossing the big brown & copper bucktail with 2 follows from smaller skies. I switched over toa shad colored rattlin rap and caught a bunch of largemouth. I didn’t bother with pics since they were all around a pound each.
I’ve been looking at a lot of reports on various forums and have noticed that out side of a few most of the muskies are biting smaller bass plastics like tubes & such. I’m beginning to think that they’re getting a lot of pressure from the big baits that are typically thrown for them. I think for the next trip or 2 I’m going to try a completely different approach and use smaller plastics exclusively. Not sure what yet but I’ll look through my tackle box and bass pro shop and see if I can come up with something that I think will produce some bites.
From what I’m seeing it looks like this “change” in behavior is due to 2 factors – pressure and colder than normal water temps. This tells me slow it down and throw things that are “outside the box”.
A largemouth on a brunner runner!
A friends first largemouth since childhood
My first small musky
Yesterday we had pretty good day. I took a friend of mine out & fished anchor bay mainly by the salt river.
While I tossed some brunner runners and a few other lures for musky’s he was throwing a largemouth bass rattlinRap. It didn’t take long before he was catching plenty of rock bass & largemouth.
I had 1 36+” musky follow to the boat within the first 20 min of getting out there and then a little while later had one smack the snot out of the blue & hot pink BR. It got off on the second jump though. A couple of hours later I finally managed to land one!
It followed right up to the boat & when I started the figure 8 it grabbed it. As you can see from the pic its not very big but hey its a musky and the skunk is finally off!
We caught all the fish in 4 – 6 foot of water in scattered weeds.
I was using a 6 foot heavy action ugly stick with 50lbs moss fireline and an AG ambassidor 6501 baitcaster.
My friend was using a 5 foot ultra light with 6lbs test trilene xt.