After the tourny

I was met at Everts by some of the guy’s who fished the tournament and that I had a couple beers with last night. The word was go South to the bridge. So that’s where my Partner,Bruce Arndtson and I started.All we could muster down there was a few Small…. and I mean small saugers! We motored back up to the dam and using Hair Jigs tipped with minnow and a fireball jig and minnow, We connected on some eater fish. Nothing huge, But my partner had to get a few for the freezer! Nothing under 15″ and nothing over 17″. We then moved on and started “dragging”. My partner Bruce Arndtson had a Chat. Pepper ringie on and I was using the new fire cracker with the blue tail from BFT. They were about equal as we pulld in a good number of fish. Maybe 20?? Bruce Learned that those fish are not stingy when it comes to that technique! His first fish hit it HARD! It sure was fun watching him get all excited!This was his first venture to pool 4 and I don’t think it will be his last!

Good chatting with you at the resort tonight Chappy.

My partner and I scratched out a few fish between 10 and 4. We were running and gunning, all the way down to the head of the lake. Unfortunately, the wind was coming straight upriver, and I wasn’t ready to brave the whitecaps on March 4. Fished the backchannel, fished the highbridge, fished all over.

We picked up a handful of fish during the day (including a 5″ sauger that slurped a 4″ paddletail) but then it really got busy after 4. Our vertical bait of choice was an oystershell paddletail on a pink 3/8 oz head. Most of our fish came between 22 and 28 fow. Toward dusk we moved shallow and dragged ringies….chart. pepper, firecracker, but the belle of the ball was cotton candy! Like you, we had a hard time cracking 17″, but the numbers late in the afternoon and into the evening made up for the lack of size.

We dragged ringworms all over creation during the tourney today and got three 17″ fish. Pretty slow, but we spent a ton of time running around checking different spots from the dam down to the lake for fish since we hadn’t been out in quite a while. I guess I should have tried to scratch out 5 decent fish instead of looking for the pot of gold! Seemed like a few fish were spread out in 6-12′ over sand, based on the fish we caught and on conversations with others. I was surprised by a couple of decent fish I saw pulled up by guys fishing vertically near the dam, though!

Sounds like I missed a decent afternoon/evening bite. I would bet that bite will only get better over the next month or so.

I got out pretty late yesterday evening. We caught fish right away on sand, dragging ringies. Nothing big, a few fat 18-20″ female eyes that are still swimming. We kept a couple of meals of sauger and male eyes. Action was fast for the first hour with 3 doubleheaders. Total catch was around 20. Oh yeah, in case ya’ll didn’t know this already, check to make sure your plugs are in.