We arrived at 6:45 and less than 10 boats were at the launch. After waiting for only one boat, we hit the water at 7am on Saturday and headed out. The wind was out of the NW at 10-15 mph providing just the right chop for long drifts.
Wanting to fish the very edge of the emerging cabbage, we graphed the weeds out to about 8 feet. It was there we started out first drift. Tipped with excellent medium sized shiners and rainbows from Ben’s Bait, we dropped our 1/8 oz jigs to the bottom of the 46 degree water. It wasn’t 90 seconds before we had our first fish, a 22″ pike.
Within the first hour we had landed 8 more pike and our first walleye, a chunky 16 incher. This trend continued throughout the day. While we lost track of the pike, I estimate we caught pike to walleyes about 8 to 1. For the day we managed 6 lunch sized walleyes ranging from 15-17, 8 nice jumbo perch, and about 50 hammer handle pike with the largest running only 29″. The pike action finally was outweighed by the multiple rain storms and cutting wind as the weather chased us off the lake.
Jig color didn’t seem to have much effect on the bite this day. We ran everything from dark blue to parrot to orange to glow white. They all worked the same. We did notice that some folks were dragging snells without much success. We talked to some others at the launch, some faired a slight bit better and some faired a slight bit worse. Based on talking with folks, we had a pretty typical bite for the lake that day. All in all, a great day on Bowstring.
