Heading to Portage Lake (Pinckney) Sunday Morning [Archive]

Papa_Ron

07-08-2006, 11:04 AM

Well the trip is 'on'. 'Finally' got it worked out with Klave's Marina for a Pontoon rental for the day. Was kind of touch & go with it for a couple of days, as Klave's were having a few problems with a couple of their Pontoons. First we had one, then we didn't, then we did, then we didn't again, and now we do, 'again', lol.

As it turns out, son's boss has a place on one of the lakes (the one farthest from Portage Lake), and says that our best bet would be to fish 'that lake' he is on. Says it's probably the 2nd best lake to fish of them all that are connected, plus the least used for power boating, skiers, jet skiers, etc.

Looking forward to tomorrow, but more importantly, those grandboys of ours are really excited!

Papa_Ron

07-11-2006, 11:12 AM

Well now...we're back. Empty handed? Well no, not exactly. But a full basket? Well, no, not exactly that either.

What did we have to fish with? Crawlers! Yep, that's all....just crawlers. The owner of the Marina (Kim), said we could access the bait shop by lake, and that the place had every bait we would want. WRONG! Nope!....the hardware store only had 'crawlers'. That's all, nothing else. He was 'supposed to have minnows and everything, but he didn't. And, no way to find other baits unless we were to boat all the way back to Klave's Marina, then take the car 'somewhere else', to find more variety of baits. We didn't want to waste the time, as we didn't even get on the lake until 11:00 a.m. Klave's doesn't let their boats out until 10:00 a.m., as we weren't aware. And also, they insist on their boats being back at dockside absolutely no later than 6:00 p.m. So, there went any early morning, or late evening, fishing opprotunity.

The adults (5 of us) had little to no real luck, but all the kids (4 of them) managed to get us a relatively fair bunch of rockies & bluegill. At least enough to consider a mess, and worth taking home for the freezer. They were pretty proud of themselves, and of course weren't letting the adults live down the fact that a bunch of little snots skunked us. lolololol

All-in-all? It was a fine day, if just for the fact that we really enjoyed watching those little guys' excitement. The day was fine with temperatures. Not too hot, not too cold. A bit cloudy off & on. We fished deep, we fished shallow. We fished sand, we fished gravel & rock. We fished weeds & muck. Only time we really saw much in the way of decent size 'anything', was when we used all the channels to access from one lake to the next. Nice and clear, and rather large bluegill as well as very nice looking lm zipping all over the place. The Pontoon was scaring them too much and they ran far and wide to get away from us. Dropped out a couple of lines trying to entice them, but no luck with it. And periodically, the wind did come up rather breezy a fair amount of the time.

And will we go back to "Klave's Marina" again? Umm...well...none of us were all that impressed with Mr. Kim. I kind of didn't like him to a great extent. He and I mixed a few words at day's end. That's another whole story in itself.

Anyway....on the chain of lakes, we managed to fish Big Portage/Base Line/Whitewood/Gallagher. Actually, we spent very very little time on Big Portage, as it was cholk full of boaters and the like. Base Line wasn't extremely bad, but rather busy to. The other lakes we couldn't really access (Little Portage/Tamarack) because of the 'Pontoon'. And we didn't really have time to give Strawberry & Zukey a try. There were quite a lot of other boats out fishing to, and we checked with pretty much most of them. We found no one else having much more luck than we were either.

We would all like to give that chain another try another time, but will have to look for another place to rent a Pontoon from. Just don't think we want to give Kim our business again.

I have a couple of photos of the boys with a fish, and would post them, "if I knew how to do that here". But I don't. lol

I guess maybe not much of an exciting fishing report, lol. But hey, you know what they say....'any' day on the water fishing (especially with the little grandboys), is better than....'not'!