I had an opportunity to spend the night out on the St. Croix with an old friend. We haven’t been fishing together for about 15 years so we were long over due. He’s had some success in the past fishing for ‘cats on the St. Croix.
Saturday morning I “cultivated” the garden and came up with enough worms to make an attempt at catching some bullheads in a local pond. That was a total bust as I never got a bite. So we stopped at Jimmy’s and bought a bunch of suckers and other tackle. The guy at Jimmy’s claimed that someone came in Friday night with a picure of a gigantic Flat that was claimed to be state record size. Anyone else hear about this fish?
So suckers and crawlers in hand we headed down to Afton and anchored up above a deep hole. It wasn’t 10 minutes before the bait clicker started to scream as I had a good run on one of the suckers. The fish pulled about 50 feet of line, stopped, and never came back 
. Later parnter landed a 14 inch Smallmouth that ate three crawlers on a 3/0 circle hook….And then I had another sucker get scaled but no hook up. I’m started to get the idea that I’m in over my head. 
By now it’s 11:30 and we’re on our third game of cribbage. The suckers had all died so I was using a combination of sliced up sucker and crawler. I noticed my line was doing the “Rainey River Sturgeon Twitch” so I picked it up and tightened up on a decent Channel 
We fished throughout the night in several different spots, frequently getting nibblers but no real bits. I eventually connected with one of the mystery bites and hooked a very pissed off soft-shell turtle. We fished until 7:00 AM and decided to call it a day.
The St. Croix is an interesting place. Do you remember the scne from “Caddy Shack” where Judge Smail is christening his new boat? It looked like that, including a couple of Rodney’s tearing around. A big contrast to the quiet solitude of Pool 2 where it’s just you, a few other guys fishing, and the barges 
I can’t wait to do it again.
Rootski
GL
