Gord Schultz

Well for the last 3 weeks Sheldon and I have been busy with our Walleye School and prefishing for a tournament last weekend, and with another 2 tournaments in the next 2 weeks this was the only weekend in May that was available to spend with the family.
I’ve always wanted to see what the Laker bite was like on Big Rideau and with the opener this weekend it was the perfect time to give it a try. I checked the usual sites for any advice and spoke to a few locals and put the game plan together. The plan was trolling on Saturday and jigging on Sunday. It was also nice to fish my son extra rod… I mean Emmerson

We headed out a little late on Saturday and for once it wasn’t my fault. Emmerson normally gets up around 6:00 AM every day so I told him Friday night to wake me up and we’ll head out. I get a tap on the shoulder at 7:10 AM with “Dad I slept in”. No problem, grabbed our snacks and headed down to the dock and off we went. Made it to the Laker grounds in about 15 minutes (That darn no wake zone at Rideau Ferry) and we were fishing right away. We were using slide divers with spoons, one a West River Cooper/Silver and the other was Emmerson’s pick a small watermelon spoon that I’ve had for about 10 years and never used (see where this is going?). We were fishing in 60′ – 90′ of water and they were spread out from 30′ – 60′ down. Our lines were running at 25′ and 35′. It wasn’t long until the first rod fired and we had our first Laker ever on Big Rideau. Emmerson did an awesome job on the reeling

We managed a few more around the same size and the bite seemed to stop around 11:00 AM which was perfect time because we had to meet up with one of Emmerson’s friends at his cottage nearby.

The next day I tried something that I’ve never done before for Lakers and that was jigging. We were using 1 1/2oz snakie jigging spoons and the hot colour for the day was silver. We managed 4 for the day biggest was 23″. All we did were long drifts, letting out line until we hit bottom, jigged 3 – 4 times, reeled in a bit, jigging 3 – 4 times, rinse, repeat until it was at the boat and then dropped down again. It was tons of fun when they hit and they hit like a ton of bricks. It was also a nice chance to try my new live bait rod out.

All in all it was great weekend of fishing and spending time with the family. The best news came yesterday when we were at a friend’s cottage down the lake and Emmerson was out fishing with his buddy, he managed to find us a good crappie spot that we plan to try later this week. Looking forward to Wednesday night with the ORWL gang and then some crappie fishing on Thursday before heading down to Quinte for our next tournament.