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| June! Just saying that makes me all warm and fuzzy inside! Living in northeast Ohio, our winters are so long and drug out. It's not that we have 5 or 6 months straight of hard snow and sustained sub zero temperatures around here. Just that it’s seemingly always ugly gray, damp and chilly most of the time around here from October till well into the spring. And when you get cheated out of a normal spring and get additional months of cool and extremely wet conditions like we did this year, well our short lived real summer just couldn't get here soon enough. And that’s what June brings us. The promise of warmth, sun and fishing in tee shirts and shorts! It’s been a very long raw off season indeed. |
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| But for whatever reason, the Walleyes have arrived super early this year for this part of the lake in record numbers despite the lousy April and May that we had. Normally Ashtabula and the Central basin in general is considered to peak a little later in the summer when migrating Walleyes from other more shallower parts of the lake pour into the area seeking the deeper, cooler waters that is super bait rich with Emerald Shiners and Smelt. But basically from the get go starting early last month, Ashtabula has been literally on fire! The fish finder is sick with fish marks every day and the “marks” are more then eager to bite our offerings. This past week for us aboard THE TROPHY, the fishing was just ridiculously easy. We scored rack full after rack full of beautifully sized Walleyes along with a handful of real hogs including one monster that went 31 & 1/4” inches. What a fish! |
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| We have literally picked right up where we left off last October with our unreal streak of perfect limit days last year. Other then my very first trip of the year this year where we did not limit out but still did well, it has been a perfect score for us with all my guests maxing out their “tickets” and even us catching boat limits on some days with me reeling in fish too! I’m not going to dwell too much on this perfect record thing for too long for fear of jinxing myself but I think the only thing that might interrupt the roll that we are on again would be having to fish in some harsh conditions where we can’t get our normal spread out or be limited to where we can fish. Right now it’s easy pickings with the fish just around the corner of the lighthouse. But sooner or later the fish will move well offshore and this will present a whole new set of challenges. Maybe Mother Nature will throw us a bone and give us a nice calm dry summer for a change since the spring this year sucked so bad. What’s our chances? Ugh. I think I know. |
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| So this will be our first full week of June. I am still refreshed, rejuvenated and very excited to go. I am in awe with how many fish are out there. Not just Ashtabula but the whole lake in general. All the reports that I am reading and hearing from all different parts of the lake are all the same. On fire! We are truly in unchartered territory now with this lake that nobody has ever witnessed before. Record hatch after hatch with more adult catchable Walleyes in the lake right now then anybody has ever seen since records have been kept. Never in my wildest dreams could I ever image that in my twilight years as my career winds down that I would be part of and witness and experience something so special, so amazing and so incredible as to what’s going on now out on Mother Erie! We are all truly blessed to be living and fishing in these amazing times with no end in site. I’m trying to imagine how good it could still get out this way if everybody's else's fish migrate into this area later this summer and join what's already going on out here. Simply unimaginable! Capt. Walt www.trophycharters.com |
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