Sunday, September 23
Lake Erie Everstart Practice, Detroit, Michigan
Dan writes:
Scotty finally got into town last night, and when we talked on the phone I told him how unproductive my practice has been so far, and that I haven’t been able to get out on the big lake yet, and he said that that’s where he’d like to go today, if we can. So at 7am we met at the launch ramp, and then headed out towards the islands. The sun was shining, but it was not a nice ride, and it took exactly two hours to get to the north shore of Pelee Island. When we finally approached the protected shore, and could see that the water was a little flatter in there, I’ll tell you I was like a horse headed back to the stable after a long day’s ride… for I really needed to drain some of that coffee I drank this morning!
We next headed out to the area off Pelee Island where I spent both tournament days last month. Now I need to explain a little about how I use my Lowrance X15 out here. Every time I caught a fish out here, I immediately saved the location as a waypoint on my GPS. Over the course of three days on this one big reef, what developed was not a random scattering of dots (waypoints) on my screen, but rather a fairly distinct line running west to east. Today, with the wind blowing from the south, we lined up so that a drift would carry us across this line and sure enough, as soon as we got close, I put a three pound’er in the boat. I looked over at Scotty and he was boating a decent fish at the same time. I tossed my tube back out and within a hundred yards I put a second three pound’er in the boat. We continued the drift until the reef dropped off into deep water, but had no more bites. That’s okay though – in one pass across my area we caught three good fish, and they were all exactly on my waypoint line.
One pass was all we needed on this spot, so we moved off to check some other reefs. Over on Grub Reef I caught just one two pound’er, and Scotty caught nothing. On Chickenolee again I caught just one two pound’er, and Scotty nothing. On St. George’s Reef we both blanked, and we then started heading home. We stopped at East Sister Island, where I did nothing but Scott caught two four pounder’s, which got him pretty excited about this spot, while I’m excited about my first spot from this morning.
From East Sister it took an hour and a half to get back to the launch ramp, and I took at least five waves over the front of the boat. Thank goodness it’s warm out, and the water is warm as well. It was 7pm when we put the boats back on the trailers – twelve hours since we took off this morning, and we burned about 45 gallons of gas apiece.
Annie writes:
We looked up the weather last night and every day it is going to get colder and the rain is also coming. When I say colder, the weather forecast said it would drop about 10 degrees a day!! So, I spent today preparing for rain and cold, secured the screen house, made sure all food is in a dry box, tightened down the tent and the heater is running. Bring it on!
Dan did not get off the water until 7:00pm, when he called he told me he had to get gas and would pick up some ice on the way home. I was starving so I already made myself a grilled cheese sandwich, when Dan finally came in I made him some soup, as he was pretty wet and that helped him warm up. Just as Dan pulled in the weather came with him, large gusts of wind, rain and lightening. We just made it in the tent and stayed in there for the night.