Fishing Reports for Lake Erie

Gerb, Captain Gary (Kongo) and I fished the 10th Annual Northern Chautauqua Conservation Club Walleye Tournament this past weekend. This tournament features individual weight by fish, and also a team weight competition (3 fish per day).

DAY 1: We’d been working some fish straight out over the last few weeks and we were confident that they would be there if winds of the first part of the week hadn’t messed it up. Got onto a few fish right of the bat, but not the size we were looking for. Got a tip from Capt. Dan (who had Jack on board) that he was doing pretty good more to the west, so we picked up and ran about 5 miles. Got into some pretty good fish right off the bat, and picked at them the rest of the day. Boxed 14, and we felt pretty good that our top 3 would have us well up the leaderboard! Turns out we had 23.83lbs, good enough for 13th, and less than 2 lbs out of first!

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DAY 2: Little bit of pressure today, knowing our Day 1 box was good. Got a solid 7lber to start the day, but the next 6 fish weren’t helping much. Got a call from our friend Capt. Chris, so we pulled and headed a little bit farther west, and deeper. Took a rigger fish, the tripled up including 2 8lbers! Boxed 18, and weighed 24.45! That put us unofficially in 6th, and still within 2lbs of first place! On top of that, we had the 7th best box for the day to boot!

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DAY 3: The decision was easy. Start in the same area we left off yesterday. And with the shorter fishing time, we gave ourselves one move, if we needed to. Got 3 fish pretty quick but not much weight. Worked that area hard, then finally made a late move to shallower water, a bit closer to port. Put in a couple more, but we knew we were a little light. Weighed in 18.67lbs. That was good enough to put us in 11th overall, and only just under 6 lbs out of first!

Also have a really nice steelie that Gerb caught. He’s camera shy so Jack is holding it for him!

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Looking back, we had one fish on Friday and another Saturday that never made it to the boat. They were big! If we had gotten those in, things could have gotten really interesting!

We fished 99.9% of the time using stickbaits. Renosky’s in a variety of colors, but the perch and the clear black and silver were the best. Also ran Rapala scatteraps, purple was the best, and small reef runners in purple. Deep riggers 60-70, slides from 150-185 on 3, and a variety of lead core 6, 7, 8 and 10 color, with up to 3 ounces of weight.