Just because you can’t go doesn’t mean that I’m not going to go. This scenario happened several days ago when one of my Sport Fish Michigan Captains, Andy Odette and I went out for a few hours of fun fishing after a 3 boat trip cancelled.
With extremely rough seas predicted for the actual scheduled day, I tried to see if the party of 17 was able to switch days to a day earlier in order to take advantage of the calm Indian Summer afternoon that we were experiencing here in northern Michigan. Here for a corporate retreat, the party of 17 initially seemed interested in switching afternoons to take advantage of the calm weather, but ultimately were unable to do so.
Disappointed in not being able to showcase the awesome late October bite that the Frankfort area provides to our 17 person party, Captain Andy and I decided to not waste the afternoon by not heading out for a couple of hours just for fun. Joined by another one of the Captains that would have been a part of the 3-boat trip, we headed out onto the near-pancake flat waters of Lake Michigan.
Using a variety of presentations, trying to take advantage of the upper water-column feeding that steelhead are notorious for, we put out multiple options in the top 15 feet. Steelhead are partial to orange, and our spreads included a lot of oranges, oranges and blacks, oranges and chrome and oranges and greens. Although we missed our first steelhead bite on a planer board, we knew we were onto something, having only had a line in the water for 10 minutes or so.
Despite the variety of presentations that we were using, only 2 seemed to be getting the bulk of the attention. Sure, we got a nice steelhead on a downrigger, set 12 feet down, and got a couple of bites on a few other spoons, but interestingly, it was 2 of the more unexpected presentations that seemed to catch the most fish. One was a plain chrome spoon that had all of the paint knocked off, and the other was a tiny little casting spoon in a perch pattern. The go-to spoons yielded nothing. All this goes to show is how effective trolling a large variety spread can be when trying to refine a pattern, and also how unpredictable fish can be. What we thought would work didn’t. What we as anglers were indifferent about, turned out to be the key, with the fish responding very well.
In all, we landed our limit of steelhead in short order, and adjusted our presentations to target 3-year-old king salmon, which we were seeing on our electronics. It was a true pleasure to be able to get out for a couple of hours to just “fun fish”. It was a shame that our 3 boat trip had to cancel, and couldn’t take advantage of the wonderfully pleasant conditions, but such is the case. Just because they couldn’t go didn’t mean that we couldn’t! A couple of productive hours out on the water catching fall steelhead certainly beats sitting at the dock dreaming!
