I’m not finding as much time to fish this summer and when I do get out I take Lizzy with me. This limits how much time I have to search out and really dig into fishing but it ups the amount of Daddy / Daughter time, which, when you break it down is the most important thing in life. So Lizzy and I made plans to get up early and hit the river for some fishing. Our plans didn’t pan out as we were up late on Saturday and didn’t crawl out of bed until 7:30. We headed out the door, grabbed our gear and bait and were on on the river by 8:30. As we pulled into the Bluffs I saw the signs that No Wake was put into effect once again. This doesn’t bother me, takes a little longer to get to our spots but we don’t have to deal with the pleasure cruisers.
Lizzy is becoming quite the helper in getting the boat ready. She climbs in and get the gear in the right spot and unlocks all the storage as well as getting the plug in the live well. When we come back in she does everything in reverse, climbs out and checks the boat for weeds. So while she’s in the boat I back her down the ramp, climb over, fire it up and dock it. As I pull out of the marina there are nearly no boats on the river. With the No Wake and only able to go around 5 mph Lizzy asked to drive. I let her at it with me right next to her. She did awesome! Maneuvering the boat around all the logs in the water.
Watching out for branches.
We pulled up to our main spot after a 15 minute ride and trolled there for a couple of hours. We marked a lot of fish in the 16-28 FOW range. We were pulling 5′ long snells with leeches and crawlers. The leeches well out performed the crawlers on Sunday with lots of action coming our way. We both missed some very light biters but managed to boat quite a few eyes. Problem was they were all under the slot limit to keep. But hey, she was happy to be catching fish and I was just as happy to be watching her. We didn’t snap any pics because she wouldn’t hold any of them. So after playing with those it was time to make our way to another spot.
Lizzy was in a pretty good mood since I let her play “her” music in the boat so we had some Bieber, Katti Perry and the like going. She decided to give me some entertainment during the trip.
She wore herself out with a couple of dance routines for me and just kicked back for the rest of the ride.
We didn’t manage any keepers at any of the spots but we had a blast with what we caught and just being together on the water.
For the first hour on the water we saw about one out of every three fishing boats blasting their way down the river and about 4 out of every 5 pleasure boaters breaking no wake as well. After an hour of listening to Lizzy yell at them for breaking the law I placed a call to the Washington County Sheriff and they said they would send a boat out. About fourty-five minutes later you didn’t see many breaking the No Wake so I assume they were having an affect on that action.