Spinners, Algae and Walleye!

Well, it has been pretty hot the last week or so here in Michigan. In fact, it has been hot all over the Midwest. Most of the time when it gets this hot the walleye are heading for deeper water and seem to disappear overnight, but this year has been weird since the ice left the big water.

Right now, Lake Erie is seeing another large Blue-Green algae bloom. Which isn’t good for the lake to have such large blooms, but there is still plenty of good fishing to be had despite the bloom.

My day started with meeting Captain Andrew Oleksiak of Walleye Capital Charters at Jeff’s Bait & Tackle by Sterling State Park. After loading up on crawlers and ice for the coolers we hopped in the truck and headed over to the launch.

The weather man was calling for an easterly wind again for the millionth time this year. We just can’t seem to buy west winds this year. East winds on Lake Erie means rough water for us here on the western basin. We made our way down the channel with high hopes of catching a fast limit and maybe chasing yellow perch for a little bit after catching our walleyes. As we made the turn, we could see that the old bath tub was already splashing about. We were met with waves in the 2 to 3 foot range with a few surprising sets of 5 footers here and there.

We started our day where Capt. Andrew pulled limits just a few days before on his charter. We quickly setup on his waypoints, and got the first hit in mere minutes of placing the last board in the water. The fish ended up being the first of two Channel Catfish we would catch in this area. Toward the end of our first pass through the area we picked up two small walleye that just edged over the 15 inch mark.

We didn’t see too much on the graph on the first pass, but we thought we would give it one more try and see if we couldn’t find a few more eyes. The second pass yielded nothing for us, not even a white perch. After quick conversation we decide to head north to an area that has produced well this year and in years past.

The area we were planning on fishing had a few boats around but most of them where anchored up looking for perch. After making a quick pass through some old waypoints and looking at the graph, we motored up-wind after liking what we saw. Lots of bait fish and lots of good marks.

So we setup again and started our first pass in this area. It started out really slow with two short strikes and one lost at the boat. Then like magic we hit a sweet spot and put 4 fish in the boat. All the fish came up high on our outside and the middle board on my side. The fish seemed to be 10 to 18 feet down from the surface. This basically put them right under the algae bloom which goes 6 to 10 ft down… Then it went quiet. So we picked up and setup for another pass.

The second pass met us with enough takes to finish up our limit for the day, but short fish and fish just simply coming unbuttoned kept us 4 fish shy of our limit. So we cut the pass a little shorter than the previous one and headed back upwind for our third pass. This time we moved four of our six rods to the what seemed to be the “sweet spot” and also raised are deep lines up a few feet.

All we needed was four more bites and we were able to get them all in 20 or 30 minutes on that last pass to end our day. We trolled 1 oz. inline weights at 1 to 1.3 mph with a crawler harness in tow. The hottest color seemed to be a metallic blue-tiger pattern on a silver blade. That color alone took about two-thirds of our fish. The other third came on Capt. Andrews super secret color. That color is his bread and butter color, but for you to learn what that color is you will have to book a charter with him to find out.

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