Nov 5

Made it out for a few hours yesterday… man, was it beautiful out there or what??? Clear skies, warm enough, sunny, hawks gently floating on the thermals, no tuna boats, light wind… absolutely gorgeous!

I worked catfish for a while – nothing going on there yet (at least not for me…). Moved north on the WI side and found an incredibly thick pod of shad. I pulled my jig through the ‘ball’ and hooked 3 shad! When I dropped my line right into the school, I could actually feel them bumping the line and pecking at my fathead… was pretty cool stuff. I did manage to hook into one nice walleye at that spot – a thick 18 incher.

I then moved over to a sauger spot and worked that area for about an hour. Managed four nice keepers – a 15″, a 16″, a 17″ and the biggie for the day (and the last one hooked up before I ‘got the call from home’), a huge 20″ pig! With these five in the box, I headed home to pack up the boat and fillet the fish.

I don’t know if I’ll get out again on the open water this year. If yesterday was the close of season for me, I can say that it was a good close!

here’s a pic of the lineup…

Also, I wonder if any could help me ID a strange fish I caught. It was large, had scales like a carp, a mouth like a sheephead, and the dorsal fin had a long wispy extension that extended back the length of the body… any thoughts??

Sounds like a Quill back sucker. Neat looking fish.

yeah, that could be it… I just googled it – not many images but there was one pic out there that looked pretty close. It was a pretty cool looking fish – wish I had a camera on-board. Somehow, I foul hooked it just between the mouth and gill plates. It put up quite a fight – made a few strong runs away from the boat, pulled drag since I was running fairly light line. When I first saw it I thought for sure it was a sheepie but once I got it in the boat, I knew it was something I hadn’t seen out there before. Just glad it wasn’t one of those asian carp!

EDIT: I added a pic I found with Google…