Sunfish don’t like the cold without the ice!

Evidently, the bug sunnies don’t like the cold weather any more than we do! (At least not without ice to hide under!!) Four of the twenty Bruce & I caught today in the backwaters near Wabasha. We had to work hard, because the littler rascals kept stealing the worms! As we were leaving the landing, we were told by a guy just starting out that the big perch were biting about 200 yards upstream from where we fished. Bummer, Dudes!! Maybe next time…….

I got into a mess of nice sunfish and a few 13 inch crappies yesterday, too, on the river. My fishing was the flip-side of what you found. I used straight plastic after 8:30 in the morning and used a couple of waxies prior to that and the sunfish drove me crazy with hitting. One thing I found was that the sunnies were liking deeper water and hitting quite deep right off in the morning but they came up in the water column nicely as the morning wore on.

We went again yesterday and had to go deeper, too. We found a consistent 7″-8″ over the noon hour. Deeper water meant less small fish. I heard the same story from a Lake City friend who was fishing on Pepin. He set the slip bobbers for about 10′ and cast out into deeper water. When the bobber came into the rocks at 10′, he & his son landed 28 very nice sunfish before running out of bait.

That’s funny because I have had the same experience fishing a lake in the fall up in Grand Rapids. There are several rock humps and we set our bobbers to start dragging the bait once it hit the pile. You wouldn’t catch a fish until your bobber went on its side from the bait resting on the bottom.