Host: Lets talk about small mouth bass, you probably catch a few of those on Lake Michigan don't you?
Guest: Yeah every now and then I get lucky and get into them.
Host: If you believe the ESPN coverage that we get to see, those of us that have never fished lake Erie, it seems to me it's all about the drop shot out there but there has got to be other ways of catching smallies out on lake Erie?
Guest: You know there really is. When I started drop shot in on lake Erie everybody else was still throwing drift socks and tubes so I kind of got a jump start on the game. The drop shot itself is a very specific precise technique where dragging a tube is generally just drifting over an area. The more precise you are with egg drop shot the bigger the bags you can come in with. That being said there is other techniques out there that are catching them very well in fact. Two of my favorites are jigging spoons and super deep diving jerk baits like 824A bomber and it's really kind of an overlooked technique. Basically what I did was take a 824A bomber a setting ascentsualy a walleye trollIng lure about the size of a smaller jerk bait but it has a huge bill on it and I was trying to figure out if there was some way to get these fish to respond to a jerk bait over 20 feet of water. So what I did I played around with this jerk bait for a while and I figured out how much lead to add to it to get it to suspend. I can get this thing down to know about 11 1/2 ft. And I'm calling up fish from about 20ft. to hit this jerk bait so when the lake gets flat I can go over these huge flats with that huge jerk bait and actually catch these suspended fish. It put a whole new population of fish in my boat basically that's been asensualy overlooked by the guy's that are looking for structure oriented a fish and thereby passing the fish that are suspended.
Host: So this opens up a huge strike zone relative to drop shoting.
Guest: This technique is basically for open water roaming bass, it's not for the ones that are locked on structure although you can pull them off the structure with it. The drop shot is more affective at pulling off fish on structure like boulders or rock piles. Here's the whole key to this there's two times you intercept them with a jerk bait pre spawn when they initially come on the flats which there generally shallower 8 to 15 feet, and then you can catch them with your baits of just about any variety although the old standby the suspending 15A bomber is pretty hard to beat when the fish are shallow. As the fish are done spawning and start to gravitate toward their summer pattern this is when that 824A is critical because most of the jerk baits sites disappear. The fish are not concentrated yet, there still spread out and this is where that 24A excels because now I can go on the ledge for example. Most of the ledges on the lake running east and west because that's the way the glaciers moved and so now I can get on these ledges an essentially follow the end of these long monster flats with that 24A and cover a lot of water. Generally I get a better quality bite more often than not when it's a jerk baits bytes its 4 pounds or better.