Big Water

[Bender]

My partner and I made the trip last night 2 hours north to Au Gres, MI to fish a Saginaw Bay tournament today. I've never been on the bay, just heard stories about how rough it gets and how there are boulders 6" under the surface in 12' of water. After hearing about everybody else's plans to make a 9 mile run to the Charity Islands to fish for spawning bass we decided to gamble on another spot that was 20 miles away. We checked satellite photos and the water looked clear over there so this morning we set out to make our run.

About halfway across the lake it started to get rough, went from running 60MPH to running 20 riding 3-4' waves. I'm not the best driver in tough water so I ended up spearing 3 waves on our way over. Did I mention that it was 34 degree at blastoff? We finally get there almost an hour later and the water was complete mud and by this time there are solid 4 footers. We were taking waves over the bow just sitting there! We decide it is not going to get better so we should just head back. This was bad since it was right into the waves. I tried to go straight nose up but speared a lot of them so we ended up zig zagging through them, running about 7-10 MPH. Halfway back I realized we are 10 miles from the nearest land and hope that nothing goes wrong out there. A little while longer I got delirious from watching and fighting the waves to my partner finished the drive back in. We make is back to the launch and jump in the truck to thaw out.

After calling the director and telling him we went all in on the first hand and busted, we headed down the road. We dried out quickly so we went to an inland lake, Wixom. We fished there for about 4 hours and caught many decent fish. I got one good smallie from under a pontoon even. My partner worked on a fish guarding fry for about 45 minutes while I practiced throwing a swim jig and missed 2 fish. He finalley got the fish to go and it was a little smaller than he thought but still a nice bass:



Got home and had to pull everything out of the boat to dry it. It ended up taking 24 pounds for 6 fish to win today on the Bay. I am making a note to never go to Saginaw Bay again if there is a forecast for anything but less than 1 foot waves.