Just got skunked after an entire 5-6 hours of fishing yesterday on Busse Lake (Northwestern Chicago metro area), cousin caught one. In an effort to become a better angler, I'm analyzing and trying to figure out how I could have avoided it and what I could do in the future to avoid it. I attached a contour map that shows our route, at the end of the post. Sections of blue are shorelines that we fished.
We focused on shallow cover near shore in the deep half of the lake (south half), especially relating to the river channels where the shoreline has a steeper dropoff into the channel. There was a good amount of natural cover - algae, submergent vegetation, laydowns, overhanging trees.
We mostly casted a b&b swimjig and rockerhead jighead, both to shore and also parallel to shore it drops into the river channel. Also used a hollowbody frog to target mats of algae. We also used other lures without much luck. Only fish of the day was caught on the rockerhead, about 15-20 feet from the shore where it drops into a river channel (yellow arrow on map).
Link to lake countour map
What mistakes did we make? How would you have approached fishing this lake, both in preparation and also during?
Things I can think of:
Focus more on offshore structure. This is hard for us as we don't have electronics, but there's some points we maybe could have hit in the 8.5ft river channel, where the two smaller north channels meet up, and also some choke points in the two smaller north channels.
Use lures with more drawing power bc of murky water. Buzzbaits, lipless cranks, spinner baits, etc.
Other info
Weather
Sunny, no clouds
~65° in the morning rising to ~85° at noon
No recent or future rain
No wind in the morning, picking up to ~8mph in later morning/noon
Lake
Murky water, ~5-8in visibility
Large areas of shallow water
Submergent vegetation everywhere, even in 7-8ft areas (milfoil maybe?)
Grassy, muddy bottom. Couldn't find any hard bottom - rock, clay, etc.
