Normally I hit lake and join Santa for some time on the water Christmas Day. This year Christmas was a bit blustery so I waited for some better weather and when I woke up today, it seemed to be calm with just some light mist. I made it onto the lake around 10:30am and headed for the north end of Mercer as the wind had picked up a bit out of the south. I decided to work the bottom in 50’ to 70’ of water and started off using a mini hoochie behind a 4/0 dodger. Five minutes into my troll and the rod starts to do its fish on dance in 60’ of water. By the way the fish is fighting and attempting to hug the bottom, I figured it was a smallie, so I took my time bringing it up, hoping to minimize the air bladder expansion. Unfortunately, that didn’t work well enough as she was floating, belly out of the water, by the time I got her next to the boat. I didn’t have anything to fizz her with so in the boat she went. Good sized fish, 18” and read 4lbs even on the digital scale. Re-rigged and continued trolling with the same setup and had a take down 30 minutes later. I have been working on a side drift-trolling technique and it seemed to have paid off. I managed to “floss” this cutt with only 14” of leader between my dodger and hoochie! Now the wind had picked up and it started to rain fairly steady for the next couple of hours and I kept to the leeward side of the Island. Once the wind died down a bit I switched up my offering to a Brad’s mini cutplug and went to work in the east channel. It wasn’t too long before I managed to “floss” a really nice 20” cutt right on the bottom in 70’ of water. After this fish I called it a day and made it back to the ramp by 2:30pm. The water conditions look pretty good right now. The water is clear and the algae seems to be doing great and starting to clump. Surface temps were in the mid to upper 40’s and there was really no discernible thermocline showing on the sonar. The bait was abundant and the perch look like they haven’t gone real deep yet, I marked a couple of schools in the 60’-70’ range. Happy Holidays everyone!

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