Thumbs up, St. Clair

Eight of top 10 pros are banking on the smaller lake’s productivity

TRENTON, Mich. – Pelee Island, Pelee Point, the Helio Pad, the Chicks, Grub Reef: when big tournaments come to the Detroit River, these are the names of far-away Lake Erie smallmouth hot spots that usually get the most attention.

At this year’s Wal-Mart FLW Tour Chevy Open, however, those places have been pretty quiet. Instead, Lake St. Clair has made most of the noise.

This morning as the top-10 pros and co-anglers idled out into the Detroit River for day-three action of the Chevy Open, eight out of the ten boats headed north to Lake St. Clair while only two – tournament leader Mark McCrone and BP pro JT Kenney – headed towards Erie.

There is little doubt that the smaller Lake St. Clair has essentially out-performed Erie this week in smallmouth catches. What makes this a little odd is that weather conditions on Erie were certainly tolerable the first two days of the event. In fact, pros who went to Erie on day one said it was smooth sailing. Yesterday got a little rougher with more wind, but still, it was not like Erie was impassable.

So why the better catches out of St. Clair this week?

Pringles Select pro Vic Vatalaro of Kent, Ohio, who usually loves to fish Erie, has actually scored his top 10 this week on St. Clair.

More than anything, Vatalaro contends it’s simply a matter of timing.

“There’s nothing wrong with Erie, it was just off this week,” Vatalaro said. “The fish are not stacked up out there deep just yet, at least not the way I like to catch them. We could come back here in two weeks and if those big Erie smallies were ganged up out there in 25 to 30 feet of water, Lake Erie would look like the superstar.”

Vatalaro said he spent two 14-hour days of practice on Erie, but he never caught two 4-pounders off one spot.

“That’s my acid test: two 4 pounders,” he said. “If I can catch two studs off one spot pretty quick, then I get excited. But I spent two long days checking all my deep stuff out there and nothing like that happened.”

Vatalaro’s fate changed when he got a call from good friend and Procter and Gamble teammate Richard Lowitzki.

“Rich called me from St. Clair in practice and said he caught a couple of 4 pounders,” Vatalaro explained. “So I went out there to this big area in the middle of St. Clair and helped him dissect it. I started seeing fish all over the graph and then caught a 5 pounder. I discovered there were a lot more fish in that area than we first thought.”

With time, Vatalaro began to dial into a pattern that involved pitching to holes and openings in the grass to catch big smallmouth.

“I don’t think this is necessarily about which lake is better: Erie or St. Clair,” Vatalaro offered. “Both are incredible smallmouth factories. But right now the smallmouth in St. Clair are positioned a little better. And so many times that’s what tournament fishing is about – finding which fish are positioned best for the catching. Right now, that’s St. Clair. In two weeks, it could be Erie.”

One thing all anglers will have to contend with today will be a big change in the weather. Strong thunderstorms are forecasted to hit the Detroit area today. After two days of relatively sunny, stable weather, bad storms could shake things up quite a bit.

Day three weigh-in of the Chevy Open will begin at 4 p.m. at the Cobo Center located at One Washington Blvd. in Detroit.

The doors of the Cobo Center will open at noon to kick off the free FLW Outdoors Family Fun Zone.

Saturday’s conditions

Sunrise: 6:07 a.m.

Temperature at takeoff: 76 degrees

Expected high temperature: 83 degrees

Water temperature: 72 degrees

Wind: SW 10 to 20 MPH

Day’s outlook: 70% chance of thunderstorms