Hey guys,
Hopefully a few of you have been following my personal and/or our business social media pages… (BBT Facebook here, BBT Instagram here, my personal Facebook here & my personal Instagram here.) If you have been following you’ve seen and heard some but not all of this and if you haven’t, I guess I’ll bring you up to speed! (With maybe one or two repeats.)
We had a hot but beautiful 4th of July here in Baldwin that just happened to coincide with our shop’s 30th anniversary and our country’s 250th. Our most sincere thanks goes out to everyone once again who came out in support, ate hot dogs and shared in the stories and camaraderie!
We appreciate each and every one of you for making it possible for us to live and chase that American dream… Click here to see what 9&10 News had to say!
Shortly after that anniversary the Pere Marquette Watershed Council held its annual Cast for Conservation and banquet that were also big successes. Water temps prevented us from fishing our normal hours, but a couple of teams fished for just a few after dark in certain sections and the rest of us snuck in a decent day by going very early in the morning…
I was lucky enough to have a couple of friends (Joe and Sean) that are excellent anglers draw me from the hat as their guide and then got even luckier by drawing an excellent beat with some of the best water temps and fish per mile…
Anyway… All of that luck combined with some excellent casting, fly selection and placement wound up winning us this year’s event both in overall and the big fish for Sean. The banquet, held at Legends Ranch, was great as always and between the two events a whole lot of money was made towards the protection and preservation of this priceless Michigan resource!
That day was, unfortunately, my last day on the river as of this writing mostly due to water temps, (Not much of a concern the last few days) but as many of you know, after having cancelled so many trips these past few years due to the same John Robinson and I invested in a new venture to supplement our income in the summer months and that process as well as getting all of that paperwork done and having some fun while doing it has kept us quite busy!
We’ve actually had a fair number of calls and messages about booking a charter since so many people saw in my social media feed that we fished in the “professional division” of the Ludington Offshore Classic tournament thinking that we were ready to book, we weren’t, but as of now… We are!
We were waiting on the state to send us the “sport fishing trolling license” that they received the application and our money for on the 7th 🙄 and our full commercial insurance policy rather than just the binder for our dockside inspection before we could do any charters, but that’s ok, we were getting dialed in in the meantime. We had only entered in the pro division because our boat has always been well known as a charter and we didn’t want to stir any pots. Rest assured we were only in it with our buddies for the fun of it and we had a lot of that! 😎👍
That being said, we just leapt over our final hurdle this afternoon and we were told by the DNR Conservation Officer who did our dockside inspection that we could charter this evening if we wanted to. 😎👍
Anyway, call it beginners luck (on my personal end), just plain luck overall or maybe, just as likely, some skill on our teams part (outside of this particular rookie of course), but we’re not sad about 19th place out of 43 in the pro division of the Ludington Offshore Classic as our first team effort in the new (to us) boat and once again, it most certainly felt like we took first place in the fun division!! 😎👍🎣
That’s about all the news I have for you right now. If you’re interested in taking a charter with John and I on the big lake out of Manistee or a trip on the river with any of us just call the shop to book it and they will give you the particulars! (am trips are 5am to 11am or limits, whatever comes first and pm trips are 4pm to 10pm and the same.)
It’ll probably be a minute before I get the website updated with the Lake Michigan charter boat information, but the guys are dialed in at the shop… Call (231) 745-3529 between 8am and 6pm to book a trip or motel room.
We are excited about the new venture, stay cool, have fun, be well, happy & safe! 🇺🇸😎
-Steve-
