Lake Champlain Fishing Fathers Day Weekend

[Bob_D]

2006 LCI Fishing Derby

The water level on Champlain was high and the water was dirty which made fishing tough for us. We launched the boat about 5am on Saturday and headed to an area that normally produces good smallmouth....Normally. Tom was on the trolling motor and we worked up the shoreline for smallies with Mister Twister Exude tubes and grubs while we dragged a crawler harness and a shiner. We picked up a few smallies (not of any size) and a lot of white perch, rockbass, a few yellow perch, and a bullhead on a grub .

We moved out to some deeper humps but no smallies. Tried some structure around a couple of bridges and got one small smallie. Are you picking up a pattern? It was now about noon so we started working some weedy areas with spinnerbaits. Tom was using a white with silver blades and I had a firetiger with gold blades. Second cast...BAM! Swing and a miss. A few casts later...BAM! Another miss. That happened 2 more times then I hooked up with a ~22" pickerel. The firetiger seemed to be out producing the white, but we were both picking up a few fish as we worked our way up the shore.

We got to a very good looking smallmouth area and we switched back to tubes. There were no smallies in the area, but man were there were pike and they wanted those Mister Twister tubes BAD (Pumpkin Pepper and Green Pumpkin) . We got ~15 pike in that area with the 3 biggest being in the 33-35" range. Nice fish they were not above the normal 10th place weight of 10# so we did not keep them for weigh-in. Oh yeah, I lost a few tubes before I smartened up and tied on a 30# flouro leader.

Here is Tom with a couple of the tube pike.

The rest of the day was pretty much the same thing. Pike on spinnerbaits and tubes, almost no smallies to speak of.

Saturday, we started off in the river. We picked up a few smallies and a few pike but the action was not too hot, so we moved back out to the lake. Miss bay did not produce much of anything for us. 2 small LBM and a couple hits from pike....that was it. We worked a few more spots with the same slow pick.

Thank goodness for the pike. They kept us going this weekend. We landed ~60 in the 2 days and missed/lost just as many. We had about 20 smallies with the largest ones running in the 2.5# range. It was a good weekend overall, but I'm hoping the water will be a little better to us next year.