Well I had my last fishing blowout of the open water and what a weekend it was. Started out down at Redwing on Thursday and the bite was terrible, the river was like chocolate milk, we caught three legals all day and no dinks. Sorry Barret and Jerome. By the end of the day I new I had to make a change and try something different. I headed back to Eau Claire to hook up with some fishing partners and we decided to head north to the Rice Lake area. Out of respect for Kieth and Dave I will not give the name of this lake since they were the ones that took me there. We started out not knowing what to excpect. Turnover? Coldwater, the water temp was 48 degrees, we wanted to cast and jig for gamefish so we started working shoreline and touched an occasional fish here and there. Mid afternoon things started to change, we started putting together a pattern for largemouth, most of our fish were in 8-12′ of water, but we did hook a few shallower and deeper. We found a small bay with a green weeds that was stacked but as we fished it further we found fish stacked down and around the bay for a couple hundered yards were it was more rocky. The lure of choice was a deepdiving frenzy in golden shiner pattern, fished steady and slow. The average size of these largemouth were 2-3#. Very few small ones, The biggest fish both goes to Kieth, what he didn’t make up in numbers he did very well in size. 4.7 pounds and 4.9 pounds. Nice job Kieth! When the coldfront moved in these fish started to shut down, by mid afternoon Saturday the bit died with the rain and wind starting to whip. We saw a doe come up lakeside with a nice 8 point buck right on her butt, also an eagle landed by us and showed us his meal, took a few bites dropped it and moved on. Fall fishing does it get any better than this? Here is a shot of an average bass….
November 13, 2005 at 12:33 pm
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