Thurs 7/2 Took a buddy out for his 1st LSC trip

Took a buddy out for his first LSC fishing experience Thursday, and we got into some decent and rather strange action, including his personal best smallie.

I had some work to push out earlier in the day, then we launched at Alter Rd. about 3pm. He wanted to bring home some meat and I wanted to get him into some fish, so we decided to go mostly for smallies, hedging our bets by running a larger musky-friendly lure on one rod, albeit at smallie speeds.

We trolled around a bit, and before too long found a good spot at about 8 ft of water, roughly a mile up the lake from the launch site. Mostly small ones at first, in the 10-14 inch range, and quite a few fish were foul-hooked (near the gills, under the jaw, etc., but all released OK despite unhooking difficulties), and lost a few fish which tore off, some which seemed to be pretty nice (my bad -- left the Power Pro on the reels without putting a length of mono on the business end for a beginner-friendly shock absorber).

His first fish of the day:

The fish came on various cranks and minnow baits, including husky jerks (regular and deep diving), a red eye shad, and a Rebel crawfish, best action at about 2.5 mph with longish lines, sometimes getting to the bottom.

A bit later on, after more of the same. a fish hit the 7.5 inch swimbait on the "musky" rod, which I wanted my buddy to take, but since we had only one proper "keeper" to show for it to that point, he insisted I bring it in ... which turned out to be not a musky or pike, but another smallie ... a nice, chunky fish, just shy of 18 inches:

Then we kept trolling around the hot spot, with some more action, and had a really heavy fish on the deep diving husky jerk ... which stayed down as we followed it with the trolling motor so as not to have yet another hook tear out. The fish eventually surfaced -- a monster smallie, clearly bigger than the earlier nice one, probably low 20s inches -- and got off .... because the rear hook came out of its split ring somehow (and the split ring itself had worked its way partly up the eye):

Never seen that happen before. Too weird for words.

But as the sun was going down, we hit a high note as my buddy got a nice hit on the deep husky jerk and caught his personal best smallie, a nice chunky 17 inch fish:

All in all, we had a great time, and I was pleased that LSC came through for my buddy on his first trip.