How to Make Lemonade from a Lemon Type Day

[TOXIC]

WJust got back from our annual trip to Lake St Clair in Michigan.  We stay in a beautiful cottage on Harsens Island which requires us to take a ferry across the St Clair River.  The cottage is on the North Channel and the US Canadian border is right out our front door.  Normally, most all of our fishing is done on spots across the lake whether it is the famous Mile Roads, Metro Beach or any other spots we have collected over the years.  As fickle as the springtime weather is in Michigan, we always plan for what we call a Blow Day where the wind is just too much and it is too dangerous to run across the lake.  One of our crew has an older 17ft Champion and although very adapted to the big water and the guy who owns it is a local and grew up fishing the lake, he is our “canary in the mine” so if he says it’s too much, even our 20 foot Rangers agree.  We then have 2 options.  1. Load the boats and trailer back to the ferry then re-launch on the sheltered side of the lake or 2. If the wind is out of the right direction we can fish 2 bays that hold a lot of smallmouth, Big and Little Muscamoot bays. For the last few years, when we had a blow day, the Muscamoot bays were an option and we did well.  This year that was not the case and we had 2 days of 30+ mph wind gusts and we decided to do something different.  One of our by-catches has been walleye but we have never targeted them because that is a whole different discipline from Smallmouth fishing.  Sure, sometimes we would catch them on crankbaits while fishing for bass and a couple of times we got enough for a good fish fry or at least enough we could all enjoy a taste but we never targeted them.  One of the locals who lives on the island and likes likes to come visit us will usually drop off a bag of walleye fillets for us to enjoy.  Although totally unequipped, we decided to go out into the St Clair River and dodge the freighters and try to jig up some walleye.  Drifting the river in the wind was doable.  All we had were some blade baits and a couple of ball head jigs which to those who walleye fish know, there was a good chance we would lose those in short order jigging in 50+ feet of water in the main channel.  When we got tipped off to a spot holding walleye that was close to our cottage, we ran over and there was a conga line of hard core walleye fisherman drifting.  One boat with 4 fishermen saw us pulling into the end of the line to make our first drift, was nice enough to tell us to follow him they were on the most productive drift line.  So we did and it was the beginning of 2 days, 3 boats, 2 anglers in each boat, limiting out on walleye.  We had enough for everybody to bring home a couple bags of fillets and we had a small fish fry the last night with grilled and fried walleye.  That my friends is how you make lemonade out of lemons! 

[ATA]

Thats sounds very nice day of fishing, Man I just imagine 30 m/h wind, That is crazy. I am glad you had perfect weather today.

[Darth-Baiter]

not sure i would catagorize that as a lemon/lemonaide situation.

 

Walleye are so delicious!!!  those are some yummy lemons. 

[gim]

They fight like wet socks compared to bass.  I've caught several this season while smallmouth fishing and initially it just feels like I hooked a twig.  Completely dead weight.  I'm fully convinced that if they weren't good table fare, no one would be fishing for them. #meathunters