Big Green Fishing Report – 6/19/2019 Eliminating Water

Bass league on 6/19/2019 was for Beaver Dam lake.  Beaver Dam lake isn’t what I would call a great fishery. It’s very muddy water, the furthest lake from my home base in Fond du Lac, and it’s got a ton of underwater obstructions that can tear up your boat.  And taking into account I would have been fishing solo… I skipped league and instead went to Big Green Lake, one of my favorites.  

I can find largemouth bass pretty consistently on the lake, but it’s the smallmouths that its becoming famous for…and the smallmouths I struggle to find.   League was returning to Big Green twice in July and Tyler and I have a tournament in there in July as well. MLF (Major League Fishing) was also in the area and holding their Stage 8 Champions on Big Green on June 30th, of which I was planning on observing the pros on the water. I viewed this as an opportunity to look for smallmouths for my upcoming events…and then compare my scouting to how the MFL pro’s fished and see how my thought process stacked up. (More on that in the the MLF on Winnebago, Butte de Morts, and Big Green article).

However, the best laid plans can still fail. I spent 8 hours on the water graphing for locations and fishing for smallmouths and came up empty.  Nadda. Zip. Zilch.  Not one damn fish. Hardly marked a thing. And didn’t’ even get one single hit.  Good Lord…what a frustrating day.  All I did was eliminate water where they weren’t that day. I talked to a few other boats who i turned out were also struggling. No one was catching much of anything… including panfish.  I can accept that. Sometimes fishing is just tough all over in a body of water…. but after the struggles so far this year it was maddening.

Conditions:

• Sunny
• Post cold front conditions
• High 70’s
• Moderate wind
• Green stained water due to the algae bloom and weed die off was finally starting to clear up. About a 3′ – 4′ visibility
• Water temps – low to mid 70’s degrees

As I learned a short time later my map study and my approach wasn’t too far off.  The champion of MLF Stage 8 (Cliff Pace)and 3rd place Brent Ehler focused on the exact locations I had identified and tried to fish as well.  That, however, was a poor consolation prize after the fact.