The day started out clear, warm and windy… as the day wore on, it got windier and windier.
I had misgivings about hitting Lake St. Croix in a heavy wind, but everyone else seemed OK with our planned sturgeon/channel cat trip. I figured with the new motor (’85 Johnson 90 hp) even if we had issues on the water we’d be able to get to some sort of safety with reasonable speed and even if things ended up not going the greatest I’d get some practice behind the helm of my boat in less than ideal conditions. (“Everyone” in this case was my wife (who was getting rid of me for the evening heh) and my buddy Scary Jeff.)
So, I swapped the 1-7/8″ ball for the 2″ ball on the trailer hitch, we loaded up the boat and off we went, headed for the landing at Beanie’s at the intersection of I94 and the St. Croix. On the way the cross-wind was enough to try to pull the pontoon into the lane to my right, but we kept her straight and (at ~10 MPG) finally arrived at the landing.
We refreshed our bait supply, and around 7PM (just as the sun set on the WI side of the river bluffs) put the boat in the water and headed out into the 2-foot swells and major chop. With a 20 mph wind coming downriver the water was anything but smooth; so we had to find shelter… or drift with the wind. The thing is, I wanted to drift the sunken islands with the wind, but Jeff wanted smooth water and so shelter it was.
Driving the boat to this sheltered location DID give me a chance to put it and the new motor to the test in adverse-ish conditions. I guess since I’ve driven the boat more over the last year I had more confidence about the boat in general; I found my best stability at about 11 mph, matching the wind speed. Suffice to say I’m still getting used to having and driving my own boat, and this was a really good opportunity to push those skills to a further extent than I had in the past.
In any case, we soon made it to our intended location, dropped anchors and set up to fish. Since we were on the ‘Croix (border waters! 2 rods each!) we had the opportunity to toss out live suckers, cut sucker, crawlers and stink. We kept rotating bait and depths for a while, looking for the magic combination of depth and bait. Here’s the freaky part of the scenario:
We ended up finding our best combination of depth and bait to be night crawlers in 30-50 FOW. For the entire evening, nothing else — live or cut sucker, cut sheepshead, Sonny’s Super Sticky blood formula, etc. — got any attention whatsoever.
We seemed to have experienced waves of fish, starting with the sheepshead run at about 10PM and lasting intermittently throughout the evening (we even had a sheepshead double at one point). But suddenly between 11PM and 11:30 one of Jeff’s rods bent practically double and we soon netted a nice 5# channel, followed over the next couple hours by 14# (Jeff’s) and 9# (mine) channels, all of which went on the stringer. Around 1AM, my rod was hit hard and I started reeling, and reeling and reeling… and every 10 feet or so whatever it was took another 20 feet of line.
Finally we got it up to the boat and there was a happy moment when Jeff stuck the net in the water and my new PB lake sturgeon swam RIGHT into the net, like a bullet. It nearly knocked the net out of Jeff’s hands.
It came out at 46x 14 and 16 lbs.
By the time we had measured, weighed and photographed it, it needed a few minutes for the release… it actually had me worried for a few minutes because it wasn’t really enthusiastic about taking off when I put it back in the water. Finally we had the immense pleasure of watching that tail sweep back and forth as it swam off into the night.
About an hour later, I had another sturgeon on, and this one was even more aggressive in its runs and in making me do the sturgeon dance. From port astern it swam up the side of the pontoon and around the bow, back down the starboard side, around the stern anchor rope, back up to the bow and made good dozen turns around the bow anchor rope.
We didn’t know that, though, until we started to pull the bow anchor up and brought the fish to the surface with it. I managed to get ahold of my barrel swivel and started to pull the fish toward the boat when it gave a really hard pull and actually pulled the knot out of the hook end of the line and took off. Honestly I almost dove in after it, but I managed to restrain myself.
Having seen the fish I can say that it was smaller than the first, but still of respectable size… probably 36-40 inches.
Still a very exciting event… but sadly the last fish of the evening.
Eventually we changed locations, but to no avail. In our new spot the smallmouth greeted the sun en masse with constant boils and jumps at the surface, sometimes 4 or 5 at a time, from right at the boat to hundreds of feet away. It was like floating in a popcorn popper with kernels exploding everywhere around us.
Around sunrise we headed back to Beanie’s to load up and head home, to fish cleaning time. The big catfish gave us quite a surprise when we opened her stomach up… but I’ll make a separate post about that so I don’t gross out the people who don’t want to see the pictures. Suffice to say she’d eaten another catfish that had dorsal fins approximately the same size as hers. Amazing.
Out of the total of 27# of live fish we got 11# of fillets… after cutting away the fat, the “blood meat” and the lateral line we were left with about 8# of meat, so still roughly about a 3:1 ratio between live weight and edible meat.
All in all, while the fishing wasn’t fast and furious, it was one of the best nights fishing I’ve had in my boat. The fish we were targeting were all very respectable and I finally felt like I was putting everything I’ve learned in the last few years to good use and successfully.
And then I went to sleep… because I was d*mn was I tired by then.
