Lake St. Clair 05-30-11
Jim & I met up early this morning and made our way up to Lake St. Clair in Michigan. We knew there would be a holiday crowd, so we were the first ones there at the gate.
We started fishing around 6:30 am on our first spot. The water surface temperature was running about 63 degrees, and the wind was coming out of the southeast at light clip. Here's a look at the sun coming up shinning on the water.

The water clarity on this first spot was poor with visibility about 1 ½ feet of water. Things didn’t look great, but looks can be deceiving sometimes. We boated our first bass of the morning probably the first 5 minutes of fishing. It was a 2 ½ lb. largemouth. It didn’t take long before the next bass was in the boat. It looked like a twin of the first one. It bit on a tube. We worked this area over for probably the first two hours of the morning and managed to catch 15 to 20 bass. It was a mixture of largemouth and smallmouth. Below are a couple photos of the smallmouth.


We decided to motor down the shore another couple miles and try another area. We mainly concentrated on the 4 to 9 foot of water hoping to tag into some spawning bass. Although we sought out the bass, the toothy critters came out to play also. Below is Jim unhooking a northern pike. We caught 3 pike between the two of us.

Those weren’t the only toothy critters we caught. We caught five muskie too. None of them were huge, but they produced good
tugs on the line. Below is Jim multi tasking with a pretzel rod in his mouth.

Check out this photo of 2 ½ smallmouth with bite out of his rear section! I imagine a good sized muskie must have bitten it.

We finally pulled up on an area that was producing better fish. Although they were spawned out females, they still had some decent weight and pull to them. Below is Jim with a nice one he caught.

Here’s one that gave us a little pull around the lake. There’s a couple different shots of the same fish.


We did have one curious incident while on the water. While we motored down the shore several miles we had a wind direction shift from the southeast to the southwest. It was like a instant warm up of about 15 degrees with the wind coming off shore. When we motored back up the shore toward the north. The wind was still blowing out of the southeast and it was probably 15 degrees cooler.
Here’s some basic statistics for the day.
Our best 5 bass weighed around 21 lbs.
We caught between 50 and 70 bass with a even mixture of smallmouth and largemouth.
No photos of the largemouth since we didn’t get any of those bigger than 3 lbs.
5 muskie
3 northern pike
Several rock bass
Two near misses on walleye at the boat (dinner)
Baits that caught fish were: tube, creature bait, spinnerbaits, crankbaits, wacky worm, shakey heads with worms, & Jerkbaits
When we left the Metro Beach state park where we launched, it was a unbelievable sight around 3:30 pm. The traffic going into the park was two lanes wide for at least two miles long. Plus I didn’t see any parking left in the park for them. It was crazy to watch that many people flock to the park. Boat traffic was a little crazy by the time we came in too.
