Fishing Crappies on Big Chetac Lake

Louie's Finer Meats, Cumberland, Wisconsin.

So Saturday I finally got out to fish with my wife's cousin Jason and his dad Andrew as well as his brother-in-law George Wimmer, the honorable mayor of Isanti, MN.  Jason's wife, Abby's parents have a cabin on the channel between Chetac Lake and Birch Lake in Birchwood, WI, just northwest of Rice Lake.  The plan was to leave about 8:00, drop my boat off at Frankie's Marine as my new Evinrude had a couple of recalls that needed attention, then head over to Turtle Lake before turning northeast to Cumberland, Wisconsin with a planned stop at Louie's Finer meats on the north side of town to pick up their "World Famous" home made bratwurst. One of my favorites is their Packer Brats' a bratwurst loaded with sauerkraut and cheddar cheese and because we are very close to St. Patrick's day they had some fresh Ruben Brats, excellent!!  I ended up gettting a dozen brats, some fabulous brat buns, and some great beef sticks for munching on.  I tell you nothing beats Wisconsin meat markets for the best beef sticks, they add that cured sour taste to them, just like a the old Slim Jim's.  Here in Minnesota the meat sticks are OK but rather bland in comparison.   My stops made me think that I was going to be late however I arrived at the cabin at least a half hour before George and Andy so I didn't feel so bad.  I was surprised at the amount of snow on the ground as it's been fairly warm but I would say there was around a foot of so still in the woods.  The lakes were covered as well but not enough to be a problem.  George brought his ATV up as he didn't trust the ice but heck, if someone is already out there with the same size truck I have, I'm usually good to go.

Jason's Bass

Our intent was to fish Chetac lake, part of the Red Cedar River chain of lakes and is a fairly shallow lake with a few well marked 25 foot basins which are perfect for Crappies.  We started on the northeast side around 1:00 but it was pretty dead.  There were some nice areas between the islands on the south end and gradually we ended up there.  At the access point there looked like a lot of cars and trucks where my map showed the basins but as we got out there the people were more spread out than it looked. Finding a spot on the other end of the crowd, I started catching sunfish.  There were not terribly big however they had a lot of black spots which I have been told don't hurt you but they still look unappetizing.  Towards late afternoon I had caught a nice crappie, maybe 11 inches and it was looking like it would get better.  In the meantime Jason really hooked onto something big which turned out to be a 2.5 pound largemouth bass., some excitement!!  Anyway just as the Crappies started hitting George and Andy decided they had better get back to George's place and see if his son Alex and the dogs were OK.  By that time I had my limit Ok sunfish and 4 nice crappies in the bucket.  Well, I could have stayed but it wasn't in the cards so we headed back to the cabin to cook some of those great bratwursts.  After finishing up I was looking forward to the 2 1/2 hour drive back home and was thinking of maybe stopping at the Black Bear Outdoors shop however it was closed so I continued back over to Highway 8 then west to home. Andy got all of my fish and the way the week has been it looks like ice fishing is on it's last legs.  On Saturday March 18th I fly to California and have a fishing trip planned on the Ocean out of Newport Beach on Sunday.  We'll have to see who shows up. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday is our annual industry APEC conference and we always try to schedule something interesting on a boat around that time.  Last year we went to Charleston, South Carolina to fish Sheepshead, that was amazing.

I wanted to point out that  I have linked to a couple of new blogs this month on the left side of the page. I am a big fishing forum junkie and I found both of these while searching articles. The first one is The Stream in Time, I ran across Len before as he has that northwoods look that I have seen on some of the forum posts, as well he has 2 things going for him, 1 he's from Sconny and he's got a great beard. I ran into his blog the other day and I see a lot of similarities, he started when I did, in 2008 and he uses Google's blogspot as his host.   As I stated my blog is basically my diary of my fishing adventures and my dad really like to read the books I printed from that.  I love his title because it really does say it all.  The second blog I added was Wild Smallie.  I discovered his blog when I ran across his post on Mille Lacs, which I thought was excellent!!.  I did ask permission to link as that's only right but I encourage you to check both of them out as Len from The Stream of Time and Chris from Wild Smallie are excellent writers and both have the ability to take you away from the daily grind.  Enjoy, I certainly have!  Pick the boat up tonight, maybe fishing Pool 2 before long with this 60 degree weather.