I fished Wilhelm yesterday and got skunked! Even worse was the fact that I was there with 4 people total in two boats and none of us caught anything!!! It was kind of bittersweet since I sold my boat on Saturday, so I was up there with my normal fishing buddy along with the guy I sold it to and his wife. I had one hit all day, and when I set the hook my line broke…bad not…d’oh!!!

I’d like to hang my hat on the fact that I think that I know Wilhelm very well. Having said that, it seems like once a year she hands me a day like yesterday just to humble me. Yesterday was cold (by recent statndards), and the air temp was 56 when we started at 6:20 AM. Water temp was between 77-78 most of the day. We left at noon and it was still pretty chilly out. The wind (as usual) was blowing steadily down the lake. For most of the morning overcast skies prevailed, although as we were loading the boats the sun was out.

I have not caught a topwater fish yest this year, so I decided to stay shallow around the launch area for about a half hour. My partner threw a buzzbait and I was throwing a Jackall Mudsucker 110. I had never thrown it before but decided to give it a shot. Overall I was not all that impressed with the action. My guess is that it is Jackall’s take on the LC Gunfish, and I found it neither walked the dog nor chugged all that well. We had no hits and decided to head out to the humps to try our luck.

We fished the humps for a while and with a variety of baits and none of us got hit. I think two crankbait rods rigged up, one with a Zoom Z-4 and the other with a DT10. I alternated but neither got hit. I also was throwing my trusty football head as well as a big worm. My buddy was throwing his c-rig, and the other boat was throwing jigs and standard sized worms.

We moved out to hit a creek channel / road bed location and again hit it with everything that we had…again no bites.

Our next stop was a couple of main-lake points that have a nice mix of cover and structure. Morgan did have one hit his c-rig here, but all that ensued was a swing and a miss. We worked depths from 5 ft down to 15 ft.

We then took a drive down the lake to another piece of offshore structure that we found in our last trip. It took us a little longer to find it because we had marked a ton of waypaoints in the area and never went back to clean them up and mark them more distinctively (lesson #1 learned). Once we found it I got hit on the football head and not soon there after Morgan got hit on his c-rig and missed. After that we got nothing else.

Frustrated we decide to do some weedline bank-beatin’ to see if we could scrounge up a few fish. Flukes, spinnerbaits and worms were thrown but resulted in no bites. We got down to a spot where there is a gravel bottom that meets up with a weedbed. Morgan did have a hit and the fish charged to the boat as fast as he could reel. When he finally caught up to it there was a couple of head shakes and it got off. The way it ran we thought for sure maybe a school was there, but none of us got any more hits.

We headed back up the lake and hit the first two spots that we tried again and then just decided to leave.

My strengths are that I am a structure fisherman. If they are not on offshore structure then I can usually pick some up out of the weeds, however I do not excel at it. I do not feel like the majority of fish were in either yesterday, or if they were they definitely were not biting. If they were on the structure then they were not hitting any of the usual fare. I thought maybe we should’ve down-sized, but then I remembered that some of the c-rig boats Morgan throws are on the small size. Nonetheless, we could’ve thrown some small shakey heads and maybe drop-shotted? My other thought is that maybe we should’ve gone real shallow and flipped. Again, this is not something I excel at. When the weeds aren’t as think I do like to do some shallow cranking, but that really isn’t an option with the weeds up there. I am interested in hearing how anyone else would approach it

I almost was not even going to post this lol, but I am interested in hearing any responses.