Short Sunday Trip

Our plans for this weekend changed Friday evening as work was ending. The person that told us he was going to take us ice fishing ended up saying that he was not going to go. He had called ODNR to check on the ice thickness and they said that it would not be safe.

I had been getting reports that it was 10 inches thick the week before. I am definately not an ice expert though and have fallen through the ice before so I took ODNR's word and decided to do something else.

Saturday I went to Gander Mountain to see if they had any good lures in the discount bins. They had strike kings lures on sale for 2.00 each, so I bought about 20.00 worth. I got 2 series 6, 2 series 5, a series 1, a red eye shad and a diamond shad along with 2 bags of strike king finesse worms.

Sunday Mizike and I decided to fish under the damn at Alumn Creek. We started driving up there and were about 10 minutes away when we decided to go to the Deer Creek dam on the opposit side of the city.

I had reasoned that with all the water they let out in the fall dropping the lake to winter pool they probably released a lot of fish that would be stacked up under the dam.

When we arrived it was about 40 degrees and raining. We fished for about an hour. Several others had been there for a while and nobody was having any luck. We decided to go to the main lake and look for some of our lures we had lost last year since the water is down 20 feet or more. We walked several miles of shoreline and found tons of hooks, sinkers and swivels. We also found a few in-line spinners, a spinner bait, buzzbait, red eye shad, another lipless crankbait, a hot-n-tot older version, and several bobbers.

By walking the shoreline we got a good closeup look at the structure in the lake. There is some awesome structure along the riverbed but a lot of the bottom is mud and flat. The area I had fished a lot last year had rock running out in the water quite a ways and was neer the river bed. Another spot near the boat ramp that I thought looked good was shallow and flat, the only rock it had was right on the shoreline.

I think it will be a good idea to spend some time fishing the riverbed this season as it holds most of the structure on the back half of the lake.

I am going to try to make it out one more time this winter and get some pictures or video of where the structure is. I might even try to GPS the better structures.