What a week it has been, the weather after the big blow last week settled down and Kris and I were able to fish quite a bit in between projects. Lake Erie Walleyes: Fish remain in the same areas from my previous report, very large schools of Lake Erie Walleye remain around the island region through Huron, My most productive depths seem to be 38’-44’ of water in both areas. We trolled the last few trips and had some very nice success, although it was a tougher bite for us this week than last. The fish remain usually deep in the water calm and for us had short bite windows. We were having to troll over a lot of fish to find a small active group of fish that were feeding. I think it was due to the strong fronts we had coming through. Lure of choice for us this week, P10s still dominated the show. Anything white or purple produced for us. Water on the Fish hawk was still cold at 36-37 at the lure depth. Bandits and Deep diver DeadEyes were used, they caught a couple fish but nothing compared to the P10s. This is pretty normal this time of year with the cold water temps, the fish like the slower action of the P10s, as the water warms up the Bandits and DeadEyes will really take off. I decided to take the Bowfishing boat out for a rip Friday night and do a shakedown trip. All systems were a go, water was very dirty to say the least with the massive amount of wind this week. But, nevertheless we were able to test out everything and insure it was working for the near future trips we have coming up. Despite the muddy water there were some nice fish up shallow already. Although we couldn’t see the majority of the fish but only could see their wakes running from the boat, we were able to bring in half a barrel of very nice sized buffalo carp and a few commons sprinkled in. I really enjoy Buffalo Carp as they tend to be more affected by the lights and vibrations, these fish rarely sit still and typically run from the boat at full speed. Those of you that grew up rabbit hunting will know exactly what I'm talking about. They act just like rabbits the way they take off and you are trying to fit a fish on the full blown run. Quite fun! I think it will be a great spring once the weather starts to level out! Yesterday we launched Kris Sir Walleye Boat and we took it out for a shake down trip. Everything worked as it should and we decided to try to hair jig a bit around the reef complex. This is the first time I have made it over there so far this year since the ice has left. Water temp was in the high 30’s so we are very early on the jig bite, low 40’s is when it really fires up. We bounced around and spot checked a few areas. We ended up catching two fish and lost another at the boat in 4 hours. The next week looks to be a lot warmer so I think the jig bite will be in full swing by April 1st. Time will tell if I'm right or not. Warmer temps this week, south winds and rain showers are on the forecast. Sounds like a good week to do some more fishing! See you out there! Captain Matt

Well ladies and Gents we finally have open water to chase fish again!!! Talk about a long off season! We were able to dodge the rain showers to slip out today and enjoy this nice warm up (we got up to 65 degrees today). What a day it was! I decided to launch a little later than I normally would just to make sure I could see any residual ice floating around out there. I arrived at Huron public access at 8:30am. Almost all the ice had cleaned out of the river by this point with the three inches of ran we have received the last few days…..I was beginning to think I need to start construction on an Arc ?. We made our way out the river and I pointed her towards the dumping grounds in search of fish. I didn’t make it a half mile out when my lowerance started picking up color. This is the reason I use thru hull transducers, it allows me to mark at high rates of speed and I can quickly rule out a lot of dead water. When you are running down the lake at 40ish mpg as long as you have your settings right you will begin seeing orange color lines appearing on your graph. These are all fish, being that active Walleye always suspend and those are the ones I target it makes it nice to be able to pick them up. On the contrary if they were on structure or laying towards the bottom this technique would not work as well. So just keep that in mind. We continued on solely just chart plotting trying to find out how big the schools were and the directions that they ran so that we would be able to come back and troll across them. This time of year especially you are trolling at a slow rate of speed usually between .08-1.5 mph as the water is still very cold. This means you are not going to cover a lot of ground with any type of efficiency, so making sure you know where the schools of fish are and that you are trolling into more fish is critical to success. As they have been in years past I found fish were abundant around most of the area in relation to the dump. For those of you that have not fished here this is a large flat that gradually gets deeper the further out you go, it has a section of two miles by two miles that the city of huron has been dumping their dredging material off shore for decades when they dredge the river. This provides very nice structure in otherwise a Barron flat. These fish typically stage here waiting to run up the Sandusky bay to spawn. Today, I found these fish favored the east side of the dump and the school ranged for more than three and a half miles. Once I had this information I moved up to the upwind side, spun the boat around and began trolling with the waves. We began deploying rods with a mixture of P10s and Deadeye Juniors both being assisted by a 2oz weight. These fish were between 20-35’ down which is perfectly suspended in 44 foot of water. I set the ipolit at 1.4 mph and off we went. I got the third board out on my side and saw my outside board begin racing back with a fish on. This ended up being our first fish of the morning and it was a nice healthy 6.5 pounder and it came on a blue chrome p10. Once reset my graph was absolutely loaded with marks I knew it wouldn’t be long. Not five minutes later we had 4 boards go off at once. Talk about total chaos!!! Kris and I took our time and were able to land all four fish and they were all solid fish ranging from 5-7 pounds. Before we could even begin getting rods back out we had more fish on, by the end of that we had one rod left out of the 12 we had set. To say we were on them was an understatement!! These fish were straight up FEEDING today. We were actually struggling to even get rods reset before they were going off again. Believe it or not we had two different times that the baits got hit while we were trying to put the board on. You know fishing is hot when that’s happening. We quickly rounded off our four man limit in a little over an hour and headed in. This is my favorite time of the year to fish as they are in large groups, ramps are not crowded and the fish are big and plentiful. If you are looking for a MOUNTER, this is the time to be here! Key take aways, trust your graphs and learn how to read them. Spend the time to get comfortable with them and do not be afraid to put some miles on the boat looking for fish in ensure you are able to stay on a steady stream of them. With the weather being warm this week as long as the rain showers hold out, I’m planning on fishing! See you out there! Captain Matt

Well folks, shorter report than usual. We remain in a holding pattern with the weather lately. The ice is continuing to break up, there is currently open water in front of Huron, Lorain, Marblehead. However, the harbors are still frozen. I am sure that the ice in the harbors has become rotten, I am waiting for a nice day this coming week, I really want to break out of one of the marinas and begin chasing fish again. I am not much for sitting around the house. I have been busy this week delivering boats to their new homes. We were able to move two of our waterfowl boats off to make room for the 2026 models to come in. We try and do this every couple years to make sure we keep our clients on the most modern vessels and to help reduce the amount of break downs and servicing required with older equipment. Not every outfitter can do this and we are very blessed to have developed a business model that allows us these great opportunities. These are all things that have to get cleaned up before we begin moving forward with our fishing season. Despite being on the road this week to both Nashville, TN and to Boltimore, MD we were able to continue to be productive. Our shipment of Muzzy V2s Bowfishing bows came in this week and we are currently setting them up. These will be our new bows for clients this coming season. We then outfitted them with Boondocks outdoor Zebpro reels and they will be sitting on Gargod rest. These are a very nice set up that our clients will be able to enjoy for seasons to come. We are looking forward to that. We do have our calendars open for Bowfishing trips to start early April sooner if the ice allows. Duckwater update, we have FINALLY received our Cisco tracks that we have been waiting for, for a couple weeks to finish outrigging her for Lorain. Our southern LED interior lights showed up as well and we were able to get them installed. These lights put out an amazing amount of light which will make those early morning departures that much easier! We even outfitter her with Starlink internet service for our clients to remain in cell phone range even when we are 20 miles off shore. You will never be without cell service on our walleye vessel ever again! Talk about an awesome upgrade. We have opened our calendar up starting 3/20/26 this year for the Duckwater to begin running trips and will continue until the end of September. If you are looking for a nice trophy fish for the wall now until the end of April is when you need to get here as these fish are going to be the biggest they are going to be until next spring. I was glazing over the walleye population reports the ODNR published and 2025 we had another boomer crop of fish, this would make the fourth season in a row. What does that mean? Well, it means there are A LOT of fish in the system right now and plenty more coming up behind them. The average walleye takes 3 years to reach the legal size limit of 15” that we are allowed to harvest but that means they will have be able to spawn two season unharmed. The fishery is strong, and only getting stronger each spring. We are on a very positive up flow! See you out there! Captain Matt