Could not have asked for a better winter’s day than today for fishing the Lake. Cold, minimal wind and nothing but blue sky overhead! I ran down to the south side of Mercer to see if the north winds we had the past few days had concentrated the bait off of South Point. I started fishing around 9:00 am and as the water is still off colored started with the rigger set at 15’. I was planning on bagging a few kokes so my offering was a small hoochie fished behind a flasher. About 15 minutes into trolling I picked up a nice 14” searun looking cutt which I released after a quick photo. The winds got progressively lighter and the sun brighter so after an hour of nothing I dropped the gear down the water column until I started hooking up consistently. The magic depth turned out to be 40’, which produced the other 4 fish I caught today. I picked up 2 12” kokes and lost a 3rd in fairly short order so it appeared my plan was working. However the koke bite stopped and I ventured further away from the shore and into the “junk line” which produced my final 2 fish, a 12” cutt and a 18.5” cutt. The large cutt weighed in at 3.5lbs and was full of stickelback. Seemed as if this fellow was more interested in eating than spawning, I’ve never seen a cutt of this size so fat this time of year. Water temps were right around the 45 degree mark and what little wind there was seemed to be coming out of the south. With all of the wind we recently had there is now quite a bit of debris in the south end so if you go, be on the look out for it and bring your boat hook to remove the salad that your lines pick up while trolling.

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