Trout Fishing With Bill

Nice Rainbow Trout

For the last few years, the third week in October generally means a trip with my friend Bill Lundeen to fish trout is in order.  This week was no exception as we could not have planned a more perfect day.  We took off  to Bill's "secret" lake where we launch the canoe complete with front and rear depthfinders, electric trolling motor, and a definite cramped style that takes a bit to get comfortable with, which is not impossible.  This year I decided to purchase a Water Wolf underwater camera that attaches directly to your line.  The camera looks back as you tie your lure to the end of it, therefore you can record a video of the bait going through the water and any of the fish that happen to strike the lure.  The camera has 4 hours of battery life and a 32 gb memory card, the card and on/off switch is embedded under a water tight cap so once you turn it on, it's on.  It purely records video and records everything, however you do not have any feedback on how you are doing until you pull out the memory card and put it in a viewer.  Because it's a .mov file, it has to be a compatible viewer and for me, Quicktime seems like it is the only easy accessible viewer that works.  Therefore you don't know if you have too much weigh making the lens point up or down, not straight back.  Obviously speed makes a difference as well.  We fished from about 11:00 AM til 2:00 in the afternoon and accomplished catching our limit each of nice trout.  In addition there is about 2 hours of video that needs to be edited down to show the highlights of the action.  It is very cool but it probably won't be done for a couple of days so I will have to add it to a future post.  I did get to see some of the video recordings before starting to write this and admittedly it's pretty interesting.  Fearing I could lose the camera, it was fastened to one of my casting rods with 30 lb test braided line.  Luckily we did not run into any issues as the transducer position gave me a perfect understanding of how deep I was.  Either way it's simply amazing how hard those fish hit the lure, one 13 inch fish almost jerked the rod right out of my hand.  In two and a half hours we stopped our trolling and started to cast simple ice fishing spoons that we use for walleyes, and had very good luck.  It was a nice change of pace as well.  As soon as the edited video is done, it will go on my Youtube channel, elevadave, and I think you will find it interesting for sure!

Nice crappie, unfortunately the only one I caught!

Getting our trout early means there is time in the rest of the day to crappie fish.  We chose Camp
Lake, just west of Mille Lacs for our destination.  Camp is a very pretty lake and the deepest areas of the lake tend to be about 30 feet deep.  Here the crappies tend to follow their predictable patterns and start schooling in the deeper structures, suspending off the bottom.  These schools are relatively easy to find on the depthfinder, look for solid marks or blobs just off the bottom or suspended half way in 25 feet or deeper water.  After checking out the issues with Bill's trolling motor earlier, we were successful in having it work for our crappie fishing which is critical, for as soon as we mark a school of fish, we hit the anchor mode on the trolling motor and fish the area.   Bill seemed to have the crappie touch this time as I sat and watched him pull in one after another.  Finally decided that maybe they didn't like an orange jig or I wasn't deep enough, I finally switched to a chartreuse color.  As well, I added a large split shot just above the jig head to aid in it's descent.  I finally nailed a really nice crappie, the largest of this portion of our adventure.  With the sun setting and a desire to get something to eat, we left before it got dark.  It would have been nice to get a number of this size fish but our excuse was that it was quite windy therefore making it hard to fish with light line in deeper water............sounds good to me!! It turned out to be a beautiful day, we caught some nice fish and spent some quality quiet time away from the hustle and bustle of work.  I am so glad that this has become a tradition for us, I really enjoy the fishing and spending time with Bill.  As a bonus, I even bought some of his hand harvested Wild Rice, it is so good!

The neighbors Todd, Lory, Lynn and my wife Lyn, they all helped to get the apples picked.  If I had to guess, I'll bet there is over 20 bushels of apples.  On Tuesday we pressed 8 gallons of cider and barely made a dent.  Todd needs cider to make his homemade hard cider and Lory needs about the same, 10 gallons to make his homemade apple wine.  As long as they help, it's a good use for the apples, but admittedly it's a lot of work.  I guess that's what makes it so good!  Definitely have cider pressing on the agenda for this week end.