Easter Weekend

Beautiful Stream Caught Brown Trout

Time continues to fly like crazy, here it's another weekend coming up....Easter Weekend.  Today is Thursday, April 18 and it marks the 2 year anniversary of the passing of my mother, Betty Anderson.  It has changed our visiting habits as Easter was always a tradition we spent with my wife's uncle, we will still do that this weekend, however we will not drive down home to see mom.  It just makes you think about things.........oh well.  So in the fishing side of things, not much is happening except a lot of lakes around Minneapolis are ice free.  With only 3 weeks till opener, lets hope that old mother nature can put the ice melt on high and Leech will be ice free by May 10th.  We've had it really close a few time where we had to fish only certain spots as the ice was still filling up certain bays.  And who could not remember 2013's Team Walleye Leech Lake Opener when the ice never did go out and we ended up spreading Ron Edberg's ashes on the ice instead of fishing.  The forecast looks great for the next couple of weeks and with the warm sun and rain, I am sure things will be okay.  Actually the mid winter's heavy snow prevented as much ice as there could have been so it might not take too long.  I also think that a late ice out produces more fish as the male walleyes are quite shallow and the females may still be waiting to spawn. So earlier this week my good friend Mark Applen went with a friend of his down near Whitewater State Park, northeast of Rochester, MN to do some stream trout fishing with light tackle and spinners.  Telling Mark I needed a good picture for the blog, on Monday I got this text with a note that the fishing was fabulous.  I am glad that someone is at least getting out and wetting a line.  Embarrassingly I haven't been out since January 23rd of this year.  The heavy snows of February and March as well as my birthday put a damper on any practical fishing outings the last 3 months.  Of course this has left me posting my friends adventures but hey....at least someone is fishing!

Panther Remote Controlled Steering

So with Team Walleye's 46th Annual Leech Lake fishing opener in 3 weeks, it's probably a good idea to head up to Bill's and get my boat out of his pole shed.  That in itself is a long story but it definitely needs to happen this weekend.  There is a lot of things to do before taking her out on the water as she's been hibernating since October.  There are new software updates for all of the electronics on the boat, engines need to be started, especially the kicker as it hasn't been run for at least 9 months.  One of strategies that has proven to be successful is trolling #5 shad raps however it's taken a few years to get the hang of slow forward trolling with the 9.8hp kicker motor, especially now that I have the iTroll system for adjusting speed and the remote Panther T5 steering system, it is actually pretty nice.  My goal is to get more proficient with it and head to Lake Erie.  Putting in a plug for In Depth Outdoors, they had a great show on last week regarding fishing Lake Erie.  Actually one of their techniques was to use the front trolling motor running in the opposite direction of the kicker motor to help maintain a more constant speed.   I was on the forum, and actually asked the host, James Holst a question regarding this technique and he actually answered, that was pretty cool.  I recommend looking at all their recent shows, one of their recent ones was Lake Trout fishing in the fall on Lake Nipigon.  What was interesting is it was in the same area that I fished with back in the early 1970's with my friends the Tollefson's and the Semingson's.  That went back on the bucket list as well!

On Tuesday I pulled off my 54" front mounted snowblower attachment off the John Deere X734 lawn tractor.  The real purpose is to assure that the amount of accumulating snow is finished for the spring.  Now comes the hard part of cleaning the lower deck, sharpening the blades and getting everything properly greased then mounting it on the tractor.  It is on of these new...."simply drive on" attachment but after looking at the YouTube video, it doesn't look that easy.  Oh well it has to be done!