Grand Lake, Presque Isle 5/27,28

[motocross269]

Fished Grand Lake Friday and Saturday...The weather was clear and Cold on Friday and clouded up windy and cold on Saturday...Water Temps were from 57-59...
I was super pumped up about getting to Grand and Long and doing some bed fishing...When I got up North, Long Lake was getting worked over pretty good with their mega bass tournament coming up on Sunday so I decided to stay on Grand and leave their Tournament fish alone...
I headed to Grand alone Friday morning...I launched the boat and headed to my favorite spawning areas...First thing that I noticed is that the reeds hadn't came up yet..At my first stop the water was pretty muddy and it was pretty much impossible to see the bottom even in less than 3 feet of water..I headed North to a couple other spots..
When I got up there the water was clear but still no sign of spawning fish..I dropped the camera down in deaper water but didn't see much activity..I had been on the water for 2 hours and only 1 fish to show for it...
I was pretty frustrated and just decided to throw the trolling motor on high and cover some water with Crankbaits...I must have ran into a large school of fish moving up because all heck broke loose after about a half hour of cranking...I caught somewhere around 15 fish in about an hour and my best 5 would have been well over 20lbs...I weighed 2 fish for the heck of it and one was 4LBs 15 and the other one was 5lbs 2...Every fish that I caught in that hour span was a solid 4lber or better...Then the bite stopped...
I fished for 3 more hours and would pick up one here and there but it was slow...Frustrated because I couldn't mirror that bite again I loaded the boat and headed to the hideaway bar to drown some frustration and get a nice Long Lake Burger...
I fished for 5 hours Saturday with My father in law and we only managed around 10 keeper smallies..Nothing close to 4 lbers...I put the boat on the trailer I had to spend the rest of the day Saturday helping my FIL get his boat in the water over at Long Lake...
I spent some time Saturday watching the Tournament guys prefishing Long Lake...It didn't appear to me that they were bed fishing as a group...It looked like alot of anglers were running around looking for transitioning fish...With Long Lake being Hardy Tugelstka's home waters I am sure that those guys will find some hogs..
I have a feeling that the Team Bass Club Tournament will hit the Northern waters just right on June 11th and 12th....My daughter is graduating that weekend so I won't be there but those guys are going to slay them...
All in all it was a fun weekend and Grand Lake was pretty much empty..Only saw 4 or 5 other boats out all weekend...I think there were 4 trailers at the south launch...None of the fish that I caught showed any signs of spawning...I bet things are going to get awesome this week...

 

[Firefighter Jeff]

  Brian, You caught a 4.15 and a 5.2 and you went and drowned your sorrows??  I should smack you.  lolololol         Glad you had a good time. 

[motocross269]

I know that sound bad doesn't it...LOL.....

[FISH21]

Nice report, good job on getting those big ones. We were also up there on the 27th, 28th and 29th. The colder weather during the week had the fish acting sluggish for the most part. Friday and Saturday were just OK days but by mid day Sunday when it finally warmed up,it was ON. I'm surprised you said you didn't see any fish on beds because we found quite a few bed fish. Friday we caught 17 smallies, the majority being bed fish on a really shallow flat inside of a large bay. Most were males but we landed a few nicer 3.5 lbers as well. We also caught a few fish just blindly casting a tube further into this large bay. We could not get a bite on anything fast moving, i'm suprised motocross caught those fish on a crankbait because we couldn't get anything going like that all three days. We did catch a few jerkbait fish on a main rocky point outside the bay.

Saturday was about the same we ended up with 19 fish. The weather was cloudy, windy and cool so it didn't make the bite any better. We hit up a few main lake rocky points and humps early on hoping to find some big pre-spawners but we could only manage 1-2 fish per spot, all of these fish were caught on jerkbaits. We then went into the large bay from the day before and pretty much fished the entire thing. We caught most of our fish casting tubes to dark spots, reed clumps and beds. Biggest of the day was probably around 3.5 lbs again.

Sunday was a warmer day with sunshine and lighter winds. We started out fished the opening of the large bay with tubes and only caught 2 fish so we worked our way out and around the point. Just starting to round the point getting out of the bay I finally landed our first and only 4 lb fish of the trip. It was a nice healthy pre-spawner holding on a rock flat. We then worked around that whole point for the next couple hours and probably landed a dozen fish or so mainly on jerkbaits, some on tubes. We tried duplicating this pattern running other similar water in other areas of the lake and that was a total waste of time. We then wasted the next couple hours running around the whole lake trying new water. After that we decided to spend what was left of our day in the large bay we started in. We worked in through the first half of the bay with one fish to show for it. We were just about to call it quits when we noticed a few smallies roaming really shallow. The fish were in small schools and we'd see a school of them every few mins or so. The fish were really spooky and seemed impossible to catch. We ran into a stretch of shoreline with a bunch of beds that had fish on them that we hadn't fished before so we had fun catching most of those fish. We wanted to see if there were more fish on beds so we idled around this island to get to the rest of shoreline past the island. As we were idling I was on the bow and I was starting to spot a lot of smallies crusing. The further we idled in the more I was seeing and it just ended up getting ridiculous, you could pretty much see a few smallies anywhere you looked. So we scratched the shoreline/bed fishing idea and stopped right in the middle of all these fish. It's only 2 ft deep in this bay and with very clear water these fish were super spooky. We decided to just start casting way out in front of the boat with our tubes/dropshot in hopes of getting bit without the fish seeing us, and sure enough it worked. I caught a 3.5 lber a few mins later and for the next hour and a half or so we wacked em. Unfortunately we had to leave to drive back down home so we left all of those fish still biting. We were pretty upset we wasted most of the day fishing in other areas and missing out on this great bite.

These fish were waiting for the weather to warm back up, and once it did on Sunday they were all over the shallows. I think a lot of the fish started bedding last weekend when it was really warm and that's why we found a bunch that were already on beds. The rest of the fish moved back out during the week because it got really cold last Tue-Thurs up there and it took till Sunday for them to move back up again. If we had warm weather all three days I can't imagine how good the fishing would have been. I'm glad we got to experience those last few hours on Sunday. It was a great experience for our first time out on Grand Lake, and I think based on the conditions we did pretty decent. Hopefully the next time we hit this lake we get some warmer weather and a few more of those bigger smallies that I know are out there