2/3/26 Lakeborn Co Ice fishing report

What a week it has been, the weather after the big blow last week settled down and Kris and I were able to fish quite a bit in between projects. Lake Erie Walleyes: Fish remain in the same areas from my previous report, very large schools of Lake Erie Walleye remain around the island region through Huron, My most productive depths seem to be 38’-44’ of water in both areas. We trolled the last few trips and had some very nice success, although it was a tougher bite for us this week than last. The fish remain usually deep in the water calm and for us had short bite windows. We were having to troll over a lot of fish to find a small active group of fish that were feeding. I think it was due to the strong fronts we had coming through. Lure of choice for us this week, P10s still dominated the show. Anything white or purple produced for us. Water on the Fish hawk was still cold at 36-37 at the lure depth. Bandits and Deep diver DeadEyes were used, they caught a couple fish but nothing compared to the P10s. This is pretty normal this time of year with the cold water temps, the fish like the slower action of the P10s, as the water warms up the Bandits and DeadEyes will really take off. I decided to take the Bowfishing boat out for a rip Friday night and do a shakedown trip. All systems were a go, water was very dirty to say the least with the massive amount of wind this week. But, nevertheless we were able to test out everything and insure it was working for the near future trips we have coming up. Despite the muddy water there were some nice fish up shallow already. Although we couldn’t see the majority of the fish but only could see their wakes running from the boat, we were able to bring in half a barrel of very nice sized buffalo carp and a few commons sprinkled in. I really enjoy Buffalo Carp as they tend to be more affected by the lights and vibrations, these fish rarely sit still and typically run from the boat at full speed. Those of you that grew up rabbit hunting will know exactly what I'm talking about. They act just like rabbits the way they take off and you are trying to fit a fish on the full blown run. Quite fun! I think it will be a great spring once the weather starts to level out! Yesterday we launched Kris Sir Walleye Boat and we took it out for a shake down trip. Everything worked as it should and we decided to try to hair jig a bit around the reef complex. This is the first time I have made it over there so far this year since the ice has left. Water temp was in the high 30’s so we are very early on the jig bite, low 40’s is when it really fires up. We bounced around and spot checked a few areas. We ended up catching two fish and lost another at the boat in 4 hours. The next week looks to be a lot warmer so I think the jig bite will be in full swing by April 1st. Time will tell if I'm right or not. Warmer temps this week, south winds and rain showers are on the forecast. Sounds like a good week to do some more fishing! See you out there! Captain Matt

What a ride it has been lately! For those of you outside of the area we have been plagued with hurricane level winds this past weekend that has made the lake unfishable the last few days. However, we were able to take advantage of the mild weather this past Thursday and the fishing was insane to say the least. Fishing styles the last 5 trips since the last report have stayed unchanged, we are still primarily pulling assisted P10 towards the lower third of the water column. The lake prior to this blow was super clean, like in the 10-15’ visibility range. This had these fish hanging in the lower 5’ of the water column which is unusual as they typically suspend about halfway in the water column this time of year. I spent the later part of this week testing new areas out, good news is we had plenty of fish everywhere I targeted. The first couple days we were launching out of Huron and targeting fish in the 40-43’ of water around the Huron dump, these fish were being weird the last couple trips I fished them. They were moving a lot, and when I say a lot I mean the schools of fish were moving out of the area in the time it would take us to set up our boards and troll back across the top of them. I’m not sure where they were going but they were all on the move. When we could get over top of these fish they were active despite being lower in the water column. The next couple trips we opted to come out of the marblehead area and fish around Kellys island. We found large schools of fish on all sides of the island and the schools were miles long. These fish were primarily stationary and had the feed bags on. In a short hour or two we were boating our limits with some of them touching 30’’. Very Very nice grade of fish. I will say the water conditions around the islands were quite a bit dirtier, not mud by any stretch of the imagination but a nice grey/brown color. If you are a Walleye connoisseur like myself you know exactly what I am talking about and it is by far the best walleye conditioned water I can think of to try and fish. I think this aided with the fish being stationary and actively feeding higher in the water columns. I will be interested to see how quickly the lake cleans up and how the fishing is after these fronts. It appears that the next fishable day will be Thursday. We are planning on fishing both Thursday and Friday this week if the weather holds. In other news, many anglers are doing well in both the Sandusky and Meumee river with the Walleye run. It is in full swing, we had a lot of rain the last few days so a new batch of fish will be pushing up the river as I type this. They are still pulling fast limits out despite the high water. I’m personally not much of a river fisherman just due to the amount of pressure down there but from everyone I speak to about they all are stating it is shaping up to be one of the better runs they have fished. See you out there! Captain Matt

Well ladies and Gents we finally have open water to chase fish again!!! Talk about a long off season! We were able to dodge the rain showers to slip out today and enjoy this nice warm up (we got up to 65 degrees today). What a day it was! I decided to launch a little later than I normally would just to make sure I could see any residual ice floating around out there. I arrived at Huron public access at 8:30am. Almost all the ice had cleaned out of the river by this point with the three inches of ran we have received the last few days…..I was beginning to think I need to start construction on an Arc ?. We made our way out the river and I pointed her towards the dumping grounds in search of fish. I didn’t make it a half mile out when my lowerance started picking up color. This is the reason I use thru hull transducers, it allows me to mark at high rates of speed and I can quickly rule out a lot of dead water. When you are running down the lake at 40ish mpg as long as you have your settings right you will begin seeing orange color lines appearing on your graph. These are all fish, being that active Walleye always suspend and those are the ones I target it makes it nice to be able to pick them up. On the contrary if they were on structure or laying towards the bottom this technique would not work as well. So just keep that in mind. We continued on solely just chart plotting trying to find out how big the schools were and the directions that they ran so that we would be able to come back and troll across them. This time of year especially you are trolling at a slow rate of speed usually between .08-1.5 mph as the water is still very cold. This means you are not going to cover a lot of ground with any type of efficiency, so making sure you know where the schools of fish are and that you are trolling into more fish is critical to success. As they have been in years past I found fish were abundant around most of the area in relation to the dump. For those of you that have not fished here this is a large flat that gradually gets deeper the further out you go, it has a section of two miles by two miles that the city of huron has been dumping their dredging material off shore for decades when they dredge the river. This provides very nice structure in otherwise a Barron flat. These fish typically stage here waiting to run up the Sandusky bay to spawn. Today, I found these fish favored the east side of the dump and the school ranged for more than three and a half miles. Once I had this information I moved up to the upwind side, spun the boat around and began trolling with the waves. We began deploying rods with a mixture of P10s and Deadeye Juniors both being assisted by a 2oz weight. These fish were between 20-35’ down which is perfectly suspended in 44 foot of water. I set the ipolit at 1.4 mph and off we went. I got the third board out on my side and saw my outside board begin racing back with a fish on. This ended up being our first fish of the morning and it was a nice healthy 6.5 pounder and it came on a blue chrome p10. Once reset my graph was absolutely loaded with marks I knew it wouldn’t be long. Not five minutes later we had 4 boards go off at once. Talk about total chaos!!! Kris and I took our time and were able to land all four fish and they were all solid fish ranging from 5-7 pounds. Before we could even begin getting rods back out we had more fish on, by the end of that we had one rod left out of the 12 we had set. To say we were on them was an understatement!! These fish were straight up FEEDING today. We were actually struggling to even get rods reset before they were going off again. Believe it or not we had two different times that the baits got hit while we were trying to put the board on. You know fishing is hot when that’s happening. We quickly rounded off our four man limit in a little over an hour and headed in. This is my favorite time of the year to fish as they are in large groups, ramps are not crowded and the fish are big and plentiful. If you are looking for a MOUNTER, this is the time to be here! Key take aways, trust your graphs and learn how to read them. Spend the time to get comfortable with them and do not be afraid to put some miles on the boat looking for fish in ensure you are able to stay on a steady stream of them. With the weather being warm this week as long as the rain showers hold out, I’m planning on fishing! See you out there! Captain Matt