Opening day is here

It's finally here and for once the Memorial Day weekend weather cooperated and made the fishing quite enjoyable. I was in an open tournament held on Michigan Center lake and the good conditions had the fish biting. It took nearly 14 pounds to win and more that half of the 17 team field caught limits.

I fished with Matt Morgan and there were actually several SCMBC members representing. Jim VanAken, Roy Albert and Scott Hartman also fished so it was good to see some familiar faces. Matt and I weighed in a small limit and caught a ton of fish as did Jim and Roy. It was good practice for the club event on Center in two weeks and I obtained some real good info.

As expected, most of the teams that did well caught them with finesse techniques and soft plastics. The senko was a popular bait but I heard guys saying they were still catching bedding largemouth even though water temps were in the high 70's and reaching 80 in some areas.

Big Bass was only 3.7 pounds which tells me that most of the big females are recuperating from the spawn and have not put the feed bags on yet. We caught a lot of small males and a few post spawn females but that should change in two weeks. The weeds are quite bad already and there was a major weed kill done a few weeks back and a lot of the vegetation from Druyeas Point back to the fifth street launch was brown and dead. Not a lot of fish were reported being caught from this area and most did not fish there at all.

I will probably only pre-fish Michigan Center once before our tourney but that will probably be a few days prior. I'm heading to Burt Lake this coming weekend and hope to get in on the last of the smallmouth spawn. I will have a few pics and some fishing reports to share when I get back so hopefully this good weather holds up.