Friday we bought a 7 day pass, rented a pontoon from Pleasant View Cottages, and went out on the lake for the day.
We were surprised that the young man telling us how to operate the boat didn't know how to use the fish finder, best areas to fish the lake, or at what depth we should put the propellers at despite having told us that there were 4 instances of people being stranding in the past week by losing propellers. So we went out and tried to stay in waters above 4 feet. The first area we tried was heavily populated, the rocky point a short distance off the docks.
The first fish we caught was a very small pumpkinseed on a #8 wormed hook.
We started to see rapid depth changes from 4 to 2 and even 1 feet of water and decided we were too close to ledge and left the area. We had a hot spot map of Black Lake but had no idea how quickly it took to travel the lake. We reached the South West tip past all of the campgrounds and deeply weedy area much quicker than expected. So we turned around and headed toward deeper water, near Raspberry Island across from Pleasant View. We didn't get very close to the island and just started traveling into 6 feet of water when we hit a rock and broke the propeller. Pleasant View responded quickly but we were upset that we weren't told that lower waters were causing this problem and the person responding said he also had no information for us on how to avoid this problem because even though he had lived there his whole life, he thought fishing was boring and didn't know much about the lake. When we made it back, Pleasant View wanted us to pay $100 for the propeller and not take it out of the $200 deposit we had already made. This didn't make any sense to us.
We left and had an enjoyable lunch at Fishbone Cafe, located at Mcclear's Cottage Colony.
Afterwards we went back out on the pontoon and decided to stay between Mcclears and Pleasant View so there was little chance of breaking a propeller. We went to a drop off near the original rocky point we had fished but out farther. We anchored and stayed pretty much at the shelf of 7-9 feet of water. We saw a lot of fish at different times on the fish finder below us so we figured this was a good area. Right away we started catching pumpkinseeds on #8 hooks. They were very small and kept swallowing the hooks even though I was using my new favorite pole, the Mitchell 300 series 7 foot light pole with 6 lb monofilament line and could feel them hit right away.
So, I switched to one of my favorite lures, a sunfish colored spinner with a worm and split shot. I have caught lots of perch and bass off of this lure, no matter what the location.
Immediately I started pulling up bigger pumpkinseeds and perch after perch.
The legendary fisherman, "Uncle" Homer Circle said that fish like the colored spinner with a worm because it looks like a flashy fish chasing a bait. Indeed we saw several instances of a perch chasing the perch that was already hooked to try and take the worm from him.
We caught 30 or more perch and a few pumpkinseeds. We tried several other lures for walleye and bass, which there are claims that Black Lake is a Largemouth haven, including pig n' jigs, top water baits, and crankbaits and got no hits. It was odd to never even see a bass jump, even as the sun went down. We docked around 6 pm to clean the 11 fish we kept.
We headed back out at 7 pm to do a little more fishing and fill up the boat with gas at Mcclear's.
Blue Heron fishing at dusk
We got a few more little bites and ended the night at about 8:30 pm as it was starting to get dark not having caught any prize winning fish but having had a great time.
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