Fished over on the Yellow River backwaters again twice this week… Monday and Sat. Monday was a little slow with only 12 Pike on the ice and only a few no fish flags and shiner steals.
Yesterday was a whole different deal.. although Wayne only iced 17 Pike , none of them trophies, he also lost about another 10 coming up the hole. We lost two that would have called for pictures. But the biggy was the no fish tips and shiner steals…. Wayne is a journal guy and he writes most of what happens in a day in a little spiral notebook… when I asked him where he thought were were approximately with flags , he said right around “FIFTY!!!”
All I KNOW IS THAT I PUT ON ABOUT 50 MILES LOL GOING FROM TIP-UP TO TIP UP WITH HIM. The photos that are attached are of the first three he caught… if we had caught any trophies we would have snapped a picture of them. By the end of the day we still were a bit confused about what stole so many shiners… This particular bay has just about every species on the Wisconsin River watershed so I guess we may never know… I probably won’t fish here again until next year.. but somewhere in 2 tons of tackle I think I have or had trebles with a keeper on the hook you put the shiner on.. so maybe next year I will try them…
Just to make sure I or we were not dealing with shiners that ripped off easily or that we were hooking them poorly.. a couple of times I tried to physically tear them off with my hand… it was very difficult… so whatever was doing it must have had enough dexterity to work on the shiner, without setting the tips off, and work the shiner until the hook hole had been stretched large enough to finally work the bait off. Many times during the day when we checked shiners they had been bit with no flags… We constantly checked the tips to make sure the line/spools and all were easy for the fish to pull out and set off the tips and they were very smooth and easily moved with no icing. So another question in 53 years of fishing goes unanswered. For about 4 hours of the day we had neighbors and they caught 3 fish on about 10 or so flags so that made us quite confident it wasn’t something we were doing????
Anyway you look at it the action was a blast.. I have never ever fished another location that is so overloaded with Pike before… and if I could find 4 more of them I would probably fish Pike 7 days a week on tips… and I have to thank John Baack for talking to an “old timer” one day that yeilded this spot. Last Monday one of the “old timers” stopped down for about an hour to share some of the old stories and than was very enjoyable.
HOW HILARIOUS IS ME CALLING THESE GUYS “OLD TIMERS”. BUT THE REALITY IS THAT WHILE I HAVE FISHED 53 YEARS SOME OF THESE GUYS HAVE FISHED MORE THAN 70…AND BY THE SOUNDS OF THEIR STORIES THEY FISHED ALL 70 + YEARS BETTER THAN I DID 
