Report 4/3/04

Well, how do I start. It was cool, windy and there were a lot of boats out today. We had 5 fish on our first two passes, 1 eater, the other 4 were sent back to grow up. We went on a long dry spell before I was able to hook another eater that came unbuttoned at the side of the boat. We had a lot of bites today, but they were sluggish at best. It was several hours and many color/jig changes later before we boated another keeper.

We started out using hair with minnows in the 16-20 ft depths. I switched from ringworms to hair to grubs to shads several times. Nothing seemed to be the ticket. I’m gonna try again tomorrow, hopefully the bite will pick up.

We fished our butt’s off. Nothing to show. Dad picked up one northern below the dam by the culvert. It was about 7lbs, but dad figures it was closer to 21lbs!
Other than that all we got was several hours of enjoying the snowgeese. It was slowwww!

I think windy is an understatement. I tried to fish the Minnesota side of the river a couple of times and got blown all over, before finally giving up to the shelter of the trees. The morning was certainly the best part of the day, with four fish between 16″-19″, and several smaller ones through out the day. Our fish came on jig/minnow and ringworms, in 14-20 fow. Still a good day on the water when most of the lakes are frozen. Still looking forward to the activity picking up. Does anyone know if the numbers will be there vertical jigging with the current water level?

I had much of the same bite yesterday. Early was consistent, but when the traffic showed up, the bite really slowed. The weather was much nicer though!!!!

Four of us fished yesterday from 7am to 6pm. We worked several areas most of which were north of Everts. We started the day pitching plastics to a wing dam. After an hour with no results, we moved down towards the Y and switched to a vertical jig pattern. We stayed with vertical jigging throughout the day with limited success. We did bring 6 fish home for the pan (4 sauger/2 walleye) and released a couple of other bigger females. The most productive baits yesterday were a 3/8oz white jig with a green speckled superdoo or a 3/8oz green fireball tipped with a minnow. Even though the fishing was not as good as we would have liked, the calm sunny spring day more than made up for it.

Waterfowler,
We did find some fish pulling 3 ways and cranks after we saw you on Sunday, but nothing that great. Using a 5 oz. weight and firetiger raps were our best combo. We boated 7 fish and kept 4 for the dinner table.

Good Fishin!
Mike