Lake St. Clair 2008

Lake St. Clair is a favorite destination for the club and for good reason. It boasts one of the best smallmouth fisheries in the nation and 3-4lb fish are quite common. Our club usually visits the big lake earlier in the year but the 08' event was held in early August and coupled with unusually high winds, we were in for quite a challenge come tournament day. But someone always catches them and Mike Maske was the man this year when he slapped 15.02 lbs of smallies on the scales. Mike has been my boating partner for this tournament for many years so I had a front row seat for his first career tournament win, here's how it happened:

On LSC the fish are pretty easy to find early in the summer but as it gets warmer, fish migrate deeper or to the channels. We like to target big sand flats with scattered weed beds close to the Metro Park launch area. We decided to do the same this event but started our pre-fishing in a little deeper water. Eight to fourteen foot seemed to be the best depths to located productive weed beds so we marked them on the GPS and just rotated spots throughout the day.

Mike used a variety of baits to catch his fish, a big spinnerbait accounted for the aggressive early fish and when things slowed down he dragged tubes and Berkley Gulp Minnows on a drop-shot rig. We both caught 15-20 during the day but as I was struggling to catch 5 keepers, Maske was culling by noon with his best fish going over 4 pounds. "I just want everyone to know that I kicked the guys' butt in the front of the boat", Maske said jokingly referring to me of course. This is quited understandable because he was also my boating partner when I won two club events on LSC but today was his day and he definitely made a net boy out of me.

Gear Notes: Spinnerbait was a 1/2 oz white nichols with white blades fished on 17lb mono. Rod was a 6'6" BPS Extreme medium heavy paired with a Shimano Curado baitcaster. Plastics consisted of smoke or watermelon 3.5" tubes and drop-shot rigs were primarily gulp plastics, both setups were fished with 1/4 oz weights. The spinning combo of choice was a 6'6" BPS Extreme rod and Shimano Stradic reel spooled with 8 lb BPS flourobarbon.