Red Lake, Chapter 2

My Friend Kevin

After Christmas and before New Years Day we decided to head up to JR's to fish the weekend.  It wasn't ideal conditions as a band of 12 inch snow lay between Minneapolis and Red Lake.  Raining the day after Christmas, we received almost and inch of rain while further north it fell in it's frozen state.  What a mess!  Even the new snowblower had a heck of a time clearing out all the heavy slush that was everywhere.  .Of course the temperature was dropping as it was in the mid 20's when my brother Steve and good friend Kevin left for JR's, by the time we got there it was almost 0 out.  The roads were not too bad but caution was the word of the day and our drive time was about an hour longer than normal.  We still managed to arrive before dark and after paying Adam we headed out about 6 miles were we found Mark on the southside of the road, just before Center Bar.  This is in the same area we fished 2 weeks ago and did well and by dark we were all settled in.  The new electric jacks worked well as they never even hesitated in doing a great job.  Admittedly they are somewhat slow yet you could sure tell they were rated at 5000 pounds instead of the factory 3500 pounds as there was no sign of stress when lifting the house up.  After getting settled in it was obvious that no one had enough fish to go back in for walleye dinner so we made pizza's and bacon wrapped scallops for supper.  The bite was slow, as had been reported by a few people.  We did get a few but going from a snow storm to clear skies and -10 below, the weather change definitely had an effect.  Oh well, we got the DirecTV going and enjoyed a relaxing night of fishing in our own little environment, a few nice glasses of whiskey, and good company was all we needed.  Finally getting to bed we did set up the rattle wheels and managed to get a few more nice walleyes, enough to have a mid afternoon dinner at JR's.  By Saturday night the snow had started again and to be honest the bite wasn't that good.  We marked a lot of fish on our Vexilar's but they were not to eager to hit the lures.  Every once in a while one would come and slam it but there were definitely more lookers than hitters!

Last walleye of the trip.

Saturday night was pretty slow as we did get a couple but blaming the weather change sounded like a
great idea.  Sunday basically continued the change in weather and the slow bite, yet we managed to get 7 in the pail between the time we got back to the shacks on Saturday to Sunday night.  Although not very well, it was comforting to know that by most standards we did pretty well.  Mark had been there since Thursday so his plan was to pack up and leave Sunday morning, which he did.  On the other had we were not much in a hurry and stayed till Monday morning before we left.  On thing that was nice is we were able to watch all of the final week's football games with the Packers and Vikings losing.  No more BS at work I guess!  Fishing was slow as we didn't get anything through the night.  Getting up pretty early we decided to just pack up and get going.  Kevin is 7 hours from home and Steve is 8 hours so by 8:30 we had the house packed up and parked at JR's as the plan was to leave it there for the month of January.  We got our fish cleaned, said good bye to JR and headed south.  The plan is to go up on the 11th with my friend Greg Kimblom and his son Marcus, let's hope that the catching will be better!  Never the less it's fun and relaxing to be up there fishing.  I thought it was interesting, for the generator we use to power the house, there is a 6 gallon auxiliary gas tank that hooks to the Honda for extended running service.  On Sunday I added an additional 2 gallons to the tank and still by Monday morning, there was only about 1/2 a gallon of fuel left.  That seemed like a lot of gas to burn but it is what it is!  In addition the power cord for my Winegard Satellite DirecTV antenna was shorted.  I was able to get it to work by inserting a cocktail pick between the wires, which held for the weekend but Just in case, I ordered a new one.  The things I go through to ice fish!!!