Open water, eighteen to thirty five feet, and where the biggest walleye live. The lower bay is reached off Au Gres, Omer, and Standish, and the reference points people actually use out here are road ends and reefs: Thomas Road, Finn Road, Vasser Road, Callahan Reef.
Thomas Road, Finn Road, Callahan Reef. Typical depths 18 to 35 feet. Launches at Au Gres, Omer, Standish. Named water: Thomas Road, Finn Road, Vasser Road, Callahan Reef, and the Buoy 1 and 2 area. In the lee when the wind is out of the no direction reliably, it is open water.
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This is the trophy zone and the one that demands the most boat. There is no shoreline close enough to hide behind, the water is deep enough to hold fish through the summer heat, and the fish out here run larger than the inner bay average. The naming convention tells you something about how it gets fished: anglers line up on road ends onshore and run out on those bearings, because in open water with no structure that is how you keep track of where you were.
The honest warning is that this zone has no lee. When the wind comes up there is nowhere close to duck into, and the run back to Au Gres or Standish is long. A day that is merely uncomfortable in the inner bay can be genuinely bad out here, and that is the reason to check the wind before hooking up rather than after.
Eighteen to thirty five feet and no shelter. The fish are larger and the margin for a bad forecast is smaller.
Thomas, Finn, and Vasser Roads are how people describe position out here, because there is nothing else to describe.
Hard structure in open water. Fish stack on it, and so do boats.
Conditions in one zone only make sense next to the others, because the wind that calms one end of this bay roughs up the other.
Bay City, Linwood, Pinconning. 8 to 17 feet. The protected end of the bay and the one most people learn on. Eight to seventeen feet of water from Bay City up past Linwood to P...
Sebewaing, Wildfowl Bay, Fish Point. 8 to 20 feet. The shallow eastern shoreline, and the most different of the three. Eight to twenty feet from Quanicassee north through Sebewaing ...
The lee zone is comfortable, the windward zone is where the water and bait stack. Picking between them is the actual decision.