Hey everyone! I had the chance to fish on the central part of the lake last week for 4 days we launched at the New Town Marina each morning and headed South. This was a tremendous group of people from all over the Midwest. They were not only great people but good fishermen. I hadn’t been to this part of the lake since this time last year so I started by alternating between a couple different types of structure to see where the fish were preferring to be. It didn’t take me long to discover they were on the flats. In the mornings we were getting them as shallow as 9 feet of water but as the sun would get higher in the sky they pushed to deeper water. One day the smile blades were better the next day the traditional spinner blade was best. Color didn’t seem to matter as long as you had a half of crawler you were going to get bit. I always use a 2 ounce bottom bouncer and nothing was different on these days. The most effective way to fish these flats for us was to pull spinners with bottom bouncers and making a S pattern as I went. This allowed the spinners to speed up and slow down on the turns. This triggered a lot of bites I’m sure we wouldn’t have gotten if we were driving in a straight line. Once the fish slid to the deeper edges of the flat in the mid morning we started using #9 jigging raps. We caught a good number of nice water size fish with the biggest being a 26″ beauty.
I do have some openings for the remainder of the summer I would really enjoy getting you and your friends and family out on the water to take advantage of this tremendous fishery! Please give me a call or send me a email. Thanks for your reading!