Oceana Fly Hot In Saugatuck

[westrate]

This past week has been excellent with limit catches of 15 to 20 fish almost every day within 2 to 4 hours. The main species has been lake trout with a few salmon and an occasional steelhead in the creel. The best depth continues to be 80 to 110 foot of water with the lake trout hitting throughout the day and the most of the salmon coming early in the morning.

The bait in the stomachs of the fish consist of all age classes of alewife from 2 in to 6 in in length, so lures from the regular stinger size to stingray and magnum sizes on the 300 and 400 foot copper have produced but not one size predominates. What was consistent was the Rapture Oceana fly. We ran this on the 450 copper behind silver flashers, on the downriggers and dipsy divers, behind silver and white Silver Horde metal flashers, and behind silver/green and silver blue bubble Hot Chip flashers. We would start with a variety of flies and spin and glows on the downriggers and dipsy divers and ultimately end up with the Oceana on almost every set up latter in the day. It is possible that in the green tinted water we were fishing, that other Rapture mirage flies would also work, however we pulled the Oceana and the Oceana glow.

I think that once the water warms a little more the lake trout will move out of this depth and we will have to locate and target the salmon. There were boats fishing from 70 foot out to 270 foot looking for the silver fish and there were no concentrations of salmon reported ( at least from the boat I talked to). The perch fishing has been very poor with 2 to 6 perch per boat reported off of Saugatuck and Holland. The perch report from South Haven has also been spotty at best from 40 to 80 foot of water. If anyone has information on the perch fishing, feel free to email me so I can put this in future fishing reports.

For information or for charter reservations, email me at [email protected].

[Paulywood]

Thanks for the excellent report as always Captain. We all appreciate it.

[Far Beyond Driven]

Charter captain telling it straight up to help us all. Love it.

(think certain Ludington reports that all days are great, with some better than others, while the port reports show the rec. boats catching 0-2 fish)