Return to Lake J 5/13/16

[djkimmel]

Derek and I were really intrigued last year by a 'pet' lake someone was nice enough to share with us. We called it Lake J. It's in Southern Michigan but out of respect for the person who told us about trying the lake it will go unnamed.

We found the lake wavy due to strong winds blowing down the length of the lake, and much more stained water so we were unable to see the bottom in most of the lake. If they were on beds we couldn't tell most of the day because of the churned up water.

The other thing surprising was the lake was a lot more weedy than when we visited it last year so we assume they must treat the lake for Eurasian Milfoil but hadn't treated it yet this year.

We started fishing fast because it was hard to fish slow in the heavy wind and we didn't know what to expect.


Fairly soon after we started I caught a small keeper off the edge of a milfoil bed on a shad-colored Strike King KVD 2.5 crankbait. I thought it was a good sign but the bite was not hot and heavy, and mostly what we caught after that were dinks.

We caught a few small keepers pitching soft plastics around the weed edges though we caught more dinks.


The small keeper I caught on the KVD 2.5 crankbait early in the day.

Later in the day I finally saw one clean spot deeper on a sunken island. I pitched into it though I could not see a bass, and caught a bass. I'm assuming it was a bed and it was our only for sure, probably, maybe bedding bass of the day. Derek caught a couple off the edge of the deeper weeds along the same side of the sunken island.


Later we went back to a nice point that I caught the small keeper from and caught my best keeper of the day pitching a Nemesis Baits Bullet Craw. It was a solid chunker though not a toad by any means.

We got bit off a time or two, caught a few more small bass and some pike before calling it a day. Not the day we expected for Lake J, but the conditions were not great and we ran into a number of unexpected variables that changed how we thought the day would go. It was still fishing, and fun!