Last Friday I took out Pete Vang (Longtime IDO member FWA)and his two sons Grant and Tehrance. The day was humid and hot except the wind was blowing very well and keeping us cool. The water was still about where it is today and around 679.5 feet above sea level, which is 4.5 feet higher than normal this time of summer.
We started the day rigging crawlers and where attacked by sunfish, it seems sunfish are the new sheepshead on the block and the new number one St. Croix River bait thief. The difference is everyone loves sunfish and eight inch fish are not uncommon. I would say eight inch fish and bigger are a warm welcome when yanked out of the ice hole and seem the right size in the summer to bag as well. We also rigged up some smaller saugers and eyes, but did not turn the fish marked on the graph they way I wanted to. So we turned to the cranks, and trolled shad raps and shad rap RS. We caught two better saugers right away.
That pattern stalled out quickly and we moved, though we did get some for the box, to start the day.
Next spot was a wind swept point and we cast for walleyes with crawlers and turned some nice smallies instead of eyes. The perch and sunfish also followed the boat and met us with a warm welcome. Petes boys started to get into the fish and were having a grand old time. Between good bites we had small sunnies and perch hitting. Grant had another one of these small bites and little fights of a fish that instantly got bigger and stronger. He tussled with what would turn out to be something that could peel drag and run deep, eventually a nice 32 inch pike came to the net and was landed with lots of cheers.
We did some more trolling and Grant caught a good walleye. The day ended with some good fish for the box with a nice bag of sunfish, walleye, saugers, and that nice pike. I’ve taken Pete out before and enjoy his dry humor and personality; his kids are some good boys and seemingly love to fish.
I would say that day cranks produced best we fished in 8 to 18 feet of water. I have been running both livebait, mainly crawlers and cranks back and forth on all guide trips recently. Bait is far better some days though, as yesterday we got into a great catch of nine keepers (both walleye and sauger seven were eyes and four saugers) and two through backs one 28 inches and the other 23 inches (I’ll report/pics on that soon).
Thanks Pete!
Turk
