Fishing Report
The St. Clair River kicking out lots of keepers, some quality!
St. Clair River, Marine City MI, 9/20/03 – Fished the St. Clair River from the channel mouths up past Stag Island. The bass fishing was typical for this time of year – once you found a school of bass, you’d usually catch a bunch. Some of the deep runs had bass scattered from 20 feet deep out into 39 feet of water.
I’ve never been much for drifting and dragging the lake or fishing bass like walleye in the channels, but it’s hard to argue with success. I prefer to cast, so I look for concentration spots, usually meaning structure such as points and humps. Then I look for prime cover on those structures, such as isolated rock piles. I spent time over this weekend doing both.
It was a definite toss up for numbers. I stopped first near the mouth a channel. In five casts to a small inside turn on the main shipping channel drop, I boated 5 keepers between 2.25 to 2.5 pounds with several followers by casting to the same exact tiny spot. Since I was planning on running the next weekend from Elizabeth Park in the Detroit River, this looked like a great spot to stop for a limit. Just across the channel, I made 3 casts to a small rock hump just off the break. I landed 2 smallies over 3 pounds on Xtreme Bass 4” green pumpkin, chartreuse and purple flake tubes.
Almost every spot current break I fished up the channel past Algonac had schools of keepers over 2 pounds with 1 or 2 going over 3 on each spot by casting ¼ to ½ oz tubes upstream. Up North of Fawn Island, I started drifting deep channels runs of rocks in 22 to 29 feet. The bass weren’t as numerous as the previous weeks nor quite as big, but we boated several really fat bass on each pass and almost every one was over 3 pounds to about 4 pounds. We tried quite a few tubes with dark colors working the best.
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