Willard 7/30/25

[wiperhunter2]

Ira and I got out to Willard yesterday, we knew it was going to get hot later, so we were on the water by 6 am and off by noon. I wanted to see if they had started work on the dike, so we headed to the SW corner. Water level looked low enough but we did not notice any work. We started trolling cranks and worm harnesses at 2 mph, heading toward the light pole. Around 7 am I looked back to the SW corner and they had a back hoe on the top to the dike removing dirt and when we took a closer look we could see they had already removed the big rocks that line the dike. We continued on to the light pole, with only one hit that whole way, so we headed to the other side of the lake to Freeway bay. We were marking huge numbers of shad there.


We started trolling with the same method as we used on the West side and started catching wipers and cats. We were only catching them on chartreuse worm harness, so after getting no love on the cranks I wondered if a chartreuse crank might work, sure enough, once we put on a fire-tiger crank, we started catching them on those too. We ended up with 7 or 8 wipers up to 16", 5 or 6 cats, up to 21", a 13" perch and a 15 to 16" eye. Water temps got up to 77 before we left. Hear is a pic from the lowest parking spots at the South marina.


All in all it was a great trip, considering the amount of shad in the water. One last thing, the shad were on top jumping out of the water, the ones were were seeing were less than 2", surprisingly no wipers were boiling on them and no birds were diving on them.