Monday, June 9, 2008

Smallies, Smallies Everywhere



Being extremely busy because of the late spring, I have been doing the 5 in the afternoon to 9:30 shift on Mille Lacs these days. So on Saturday night I was fishing with a my good friend Tom, who after working in Brainerd all day met me at the landing just north of the casino. He was on time, as usual! Tom is a brilliant electronic engineer who designed a maximizer for trolling motors 3 years before they came out. I usually do well on the deeper rock reefs this time of year so I rigged a leech on Tom's line and threw a crawler on mine. I could not have gone more than 20 feet when something slammed the crawler. It caught me by surprise as I was not ready for such an aggressive hit. That is a great way to say, I missed it! Of course this had to be an omen of things to come, also famous last words. After an hour of making squiggly lines on My GPS I finally got this 22 incher. After another half hour we moved. We tried an inshore flat then went to the first offshore flat and no fish. It was 8:00 and time to start pulling Raps. The reef was pretty full but for some reason most of the guys were fishing the down side of the reef giving us the room to troll the other side. I got a hit right away but it wasn't the typical headshake of a walleye, rather the rantings of a 3 pound smallie. We continued our route and on the other end hit another smallie. The next half hour produced 3 more smallies, a respectable rock bass, and a half a million bugs. The wind came up just enough to make the ride back to the landing bearable. The water temp was still 55 and with rain forecasted in the coming week, it could still be a while before we get in the 60's. Oh well, good for the tulibees.

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