I got a call from River Dan last night about hitting the river and 4 AM today. I jumped at it as I love fishing with Dan. He’s a great friend, great mentor to me and just plain fun to fish with. My wife asked if I could take her friends boyfriend, Jeff, along as he hasn’t fished in 22 years and would love to get out. I called and asked Dan and he was all for it.
I got up at 2:30 this morning with a whopping 2 1/2 hours of sleep, but what the heck, it’s fishing! I picked up Jeff and headed for Dan’s house. We loaded up the boat, stopped for gas and hit Prescott around 4 AM. You have to love the river at this time of day. It’s so peaceful and surreal as the boat glides up the still water. We went up the St. Croix a ways to our first spot. Tons of fish were marked and we dropped our rods. We were all lindy rigging with either a crawler or leech. Dan also cracked out his jig and plastic as he’s had success with it this past week. It didn’t take long and we were getting the familiar thumps on the rods.
We pulled in a couple of eyes that were two short along with your river standard sheepheads and smallmouth’s. Then my Limit Creek rod let me feel the bite like it was a shark and I set the hook on what I thought was a keeper walleye. In a short time I saw what was hitting so hard, it was a bull bluegill. These river panfish have shoulders on them and are beasts on a light rod.
From that first gill I put on a panfish clinic for the next hour and half out there. A few times getting doubles on my two rods. Dan and Jeff caught a couple but they were just hitting my rods fast and hard for some reason.
Dan grew tired of my clinic and wanted to search out the walleyes. I was fine with that as that is what we generally hit the river for, the panfish were a bonus. We moved and got a keeper on the first pass. We managed a few shorts and that was it. So we moved again with the same results. We moved several times and would always get a couple right away but most of the time they were short and then the bite would stop. Well the walleye bite would stop, sheepheads and bass were always plentiful.
We hit another rock pile and pulled in another keeper eye. With that, it was getting towards the end of our time together on the water. We moved down to jig some plastics on another part of the river. We had strong hits on the jig and plastics but not much for commitment. Again there were a couple of shorts put in the boat and then, on the last pass, Dan landed a nice keeper.
We ended the day with 15 Bull Sunfish and 3 Walleyes. We had lots of laughs and great conversation as well as a lot of fish boated. It was a great day on the water. Thanks again to Dan, I had a great time as usual and Jeff had a lot of fun as well and went home with what fish we didn’t eat as soon as I cleaned em.
I hope to be hitting the water again soon in the near future. The bite is only going to get better as fall quickly approaches.
