Back on The Water!!!

10 Beautiful Rainbow Trout

Well, it's been dang near a month since I have been out fishing, for a lot of reasons, or so I say.  The rivers too high, it's raining, Mille Lacs is closed, all great excuses however they don't do much for my reputation!  I do have to admit that I really miss the September/October night pulling cranks on Mille Lacs for those shallow hogs that come onto the reefs at night, maybe next year. Anyway the trhird week in October usually signals it's time for my annual fishing outing with my good friend, Bill Lundeen.  He has a couple of very special lakes that we have gone to each year for the last couple and they have yet to disappoint.  One of the reasons I get invited back is my vow of silence on the specific lakes that we fish.  Not that they are that far from his place but it probably would not take too much to fish them out and it is nice to be the only one's on the lake, especially when it's so beautiful out.  Wednesday, October 19th was our set time so I took the day off and drove up to his shop on Mille Lacs.  From there we had to load up the canoe, trolling motor batteries, trolling motor, depth finders, and equipment like nets, rods, ice, and bait.  While I used plain old worms, Bill likes to experiment with Gulp, which does work quite well.  After getting the canoe launched and set up we headed out on the lake with a pretty simple setup.  3 foot, 2 hook small spinner snell for the worms and a 1 1/4 ounce bell sinker to act like a small downrigger ball to get our bait down 25 to 30 feet below the surface.  It was crazy as I got a hit right away.  These trout are quite aggresive and put up a good fight, often breaking the surface, they can actually be hard to get in.

Beautiful spot to fish

 Also with the big sinker sometimes they leverage themselves against it and actually free themselves. The other issue is when in the net they flop around such that it can break off the hooks that are snagged in the net and break.  That is not fun as rerigging in the canoe is somewhat difficult and takes time away from the true fishing.  Never the less in 3 hours we had our 10 trout, 5 each.  We would have ended 20 minutes earlier however yours truly was in charge of netting and making sure the trout got put in the cooler however our 10th one flopped out of the canoe so we were relegated to another 15 minutes of trolling before we got the last fish.  In addition to the trout we also got some real nice 9.5 inch sunfish, definitely a bonus.  I am looking forward to trout on the grill as well my friend Mark Applen makes an awesome pickled fish and last year I gave him a few fish to pickle and they were amazing!  The lake sits down into a ravine so even if it's windy, it's quite fishable.

12 inch Crappie.

With all of our trout caught by noon the plan was to load up Bill's 16 foot Lund and go out for some of those late fall crappies.   This is a lot of fun and represents the classic fall pattern where you cruise the 25 - 35 foot holes looking for suspended school of fish on your depth finder.  It actually works pretty well as we located a number of schools out in the middle of nowhere, no structure around, quite textbook for sure.  Bill had bought a Motorguide i5 front controlled trolling motor like I have on my boat, the one with the fabulous anchor function.  You can anchor within 5 feet of your anchor point so when we found fish we simple hit the button and stayed right on top of them.  Our bait of choice was Gulp again, the small 1 inch minnows. I was surprised how aggressive they hit them but who's complaining, I caught a number of 12+ inch crappies on them, WOW!  Also you could catch 5 or 10 fish on the same bait before you had to replace.  I know that Bill is hot on his Gulp and we never opened the real minnows that we took along just in case.  The strategy was quite simple, just drop your 1/32 oz jig off the side of the boat to the bottom then reel it up 5 feet or so and basically vertical jig.  Often the problem with a light jig like that and how deep you are fishing is that the fish can hit the jig on the way up, you feel the hit but it is hard to hook them.  Never the less it's fun and we ended up with about 15crappies for the afternoon, as as stated some real nice ones at that.  Admittedly it got pretty cold when we were out there.  Fished till about 5:45 and I would say it was at least 43 degrees with a north wind taking the heat away.  I have to admit that I was getting pretty cold but it was hard to leave.  It was getting dark anyway so when Bill declared the day over, I was definitely ready.  We put the boat away then got back to the shop where Kathy had steaks prepared for us along with grilled cabbage, wild rice, Spaghetti squash, and mushrooms.  It was delicious and a perfect way to end the day.  After supper we cleaned the fish and I headed home, a very successful day of fishing and a nice day off in the middle of the week.

Saturday night was a tough for me as I ate a chicken sandwich on a croissant and ended up staying overnight in Mercy Hospital for anaphylactic shock do to a severe allergy reaction.  This time it appeared to be caused by wheat, just another thing to deal with.  I am ok now but it's not a lot of fun wheezing and breaking out in full body hives, 3 different times that night.  Maybe it's just the problem of getting old, who knows.  Saturday I will be heading to Wisconsin to fish with my wife's cousin Jason Rombalski and  his dad Andrew.  Both are great guys and maybe we can find some crappies similar to yesterday's trip with Bill, I am sure the opportunity should exist.  We are going to fish Long Lake, north of Rice Lake, Wi and the weather looks to be beautiful.  This also gives me a chance to take my boat out for the last time and winterize it as my motor has a feature that does this for you automatically.  This will probably be the last trip of the season with the boat and before ice fishing as deer hunting is coming up.  Hopefully we will make ice quickly as I am getting the Ice Cabin ready to head to Red Lake as soon as we can.  here hoping for a similar report next week.