Get em while they’re hot!

I received the call Monday night from my brother in law that he was going to P4 to fish Saturday and wondered if I wanted to go along…ummm YA. Kind of like asking a smoker if they would like another cigarette. So I cleared it with the wife and away we went. We made the 4 hour drive Friday night staying at Dave’s just east of Hager. First time there nice clean and affordable. Dave even got up to let us in at 11:30pm when we arrived(had some trailer trouble and fish license trouble…which delayed us more about that later) We got situated, set the alarm for 5 bells and sacked out with images of lunker walleyes dancing in our heads. Back to the trailer trouble, one of the caps came off my brother in laws trailer so it was bohemian rig time, we cut the bottom off a plastic pop bottle and duck taped it in place. Pretty remarkable, it stayed on through the whole trip boat launching and all. The other delay was getting a fishing license, I didn’t get my Minn license last year, just Canada and Iowa so I needed to stop and get one that night rather than wait for something to open up and waste fishing time the next day. We tried a few of the Quickstars and the way there but none had them. Then we went to Walmart…Oh boy, I don’t think they put the best employees on the Friday night shift. Got there at 9:15 and went to the fishing counter, took 20 min to track anyone down and that person said you need to come back tomorrow, no one knows how to run the license machine…wrong answer. Not wanting to be completely rude I left guessing this person probably didn’t have the perspective needed to speak for Walmart. I went to the Customer Service counter where this gal proceeded to page then walkie talkie someone who wouldn’t give her a straight answer on the fishing license machine and if anyone could actually help out. She decided to comment on this out loud and run down her fellow employees and the Walmart store in front of anyone who would listen. At this point I was getting very annoyed to say the least and thought my chances of getting a license that night were fading fast. I noticed that there was a sign with the Store managers 24/7 number and the District Managers 24/7 number with the claim that they would resolve any issue immediately. I was thinking of calling the numbers when the gal said she found someone who would “try” to help me and to meet him back at sporting goods. Well this fella named Ed was clearly not in his area but was good enough to read the instruction book cabled to the fishing license machine and worked his way through the relatively simple process. I thanked him for his help and sent a letter to his district manager letting him know they needed to hire more people like Ed and they needed to take a serious look at who they were staffing Friday nights and that those peoples number one focus should not be to hide from the customer or deal with stocking of shelves but instead it should be to serve the needs of the customers and they needed some serious cross training on all systems in the building. An hour after that adventure started we were back on the road. So back to fishing. We made our way to Everts stopped in to chat and pay the launch fee and were on the water by 6:30am and started off dragging. My brother in law had the hot hand early turning me into net boy for the first hour with 6 fish the first pass, I stuck a really good one but had not set the drag right and the fish pulled free on a turbo run after I had it in sight – 8lbs plus easy. During his hot streak he had 15 before I my first was netted. He put 4 dandy sauger in the box and 11 over fish turned back. I returned the favor of the net boy designation for the next 5 hours just smoking the mongo saugers with a few nice eyes in the mix. For the rest of the day we both caught fish. It is a weird dynamic to have your jigs literally 5 feet from each other when vertical jigging, using the exact same lure and have one person on fire and the other ice cold. I’ll tell ya, it’s a lot more fun being the one catching the fish. But actually I’d prefer we both caught the same amount. Ringies were the ticket all day except for some afternoon experimentation, I pulled out a lower pool standby, the one eye, and promptly caught 4 hog sauger and one whopping 24 inch male walleye with it. Hot colors were Junebug, Chartruese white core and Firecracker blue tail. The one eye was purple and silver. We stuck to community spots but stayed shallower than most of the boats were fishing and seemed to be having better luck on both size and numbers. We caught around 50 fish for the day and it was one of the best quality days I have ever had. It was hard to get the traditional 17-18 inch eater saugers for us. We were reverse sorting, normally you sort the small 14-15 inchers out but we were sorting 20-24 inchers out trying to get to the 17-18 inchers. Sorry about the pictures, forgot the camera so all on my phone which has no flash and my brother in law likes to fish not snap photos(which is what he told me in more colorful guy terms, something about, “are we here to &%* fish or &*^ around with your *&%camera” ) so he wasn’t Ansel Adams with the camera…Big was 26 inches.