Slow bite at Merrit

Well, I made it back from the great north of Nebraska and once again Merrit was hard on me. Water temp was + – 55 degrees and there was little, if any pattern that the fish were on.

There were some really good fisherman up there and 1/3 of the field did not catch a fish. I would say about 80% of the field went to the south end of the lake, near and in the snake while the first and second place teams threw what I believe were 5/16oz maribou jigs in several spots on the lake. I don’t know exactly what the jigs look like but they sure do know how to make them catch fish. I take pride in being a jig guy but when it comes to jigging deep water, these guys are the best!!

My partner and I and two other teams went to the dam first thing in the morning and threw cranks. One of the teams that was on the dam with us was the team of Ben Garver and Pete Meister and they ended up finishing 10th over-all, CONGRATS GUYS!! As for us, we stuggled not with getting fish at the end of our lines, but rather getting ‘eyes’ on the end of our lines. We started with throwing shad raps up onto the face of the dam and by the end of the day, we had thrown all kinds of cranks, plastics and maribou jigs, trying everything we could think of to try to get an ‘eye’ to connect. When it was all said and done, we didn’t boat a single walleye but our lose is your gain. While trying our heart’s out working for ‘eyes’ we figured out that if you throw a 4″ white curly-tailed grub up onto the face of the dam you can catch northern and muskie all day long. Start just to the east of the spill-way and work to the east. The water is much shallower there and the fish were right up on the dam. We pitched our jigs up onto the face and brought them back into the water and held on for our lives. On 6lb stren HI-vise, it was a real challenge to keep these fish from breaking us off. By the end of the day we boated several pike, one very nice muskie and several other fish, but no walleye.

Though we did not finish the tourny like we wanted to, we did end up boating fish and fishing all the way to the end. If you go up and give it a try, I hope you get to experience what we got to last weekend.