I had the distinct pleasure of spending a full day on Lake Wissota yesterday with a couple of great guys. This was my first guide trip this year that was NOT cloudy, windy, and rainy….instead we enjoyed partly cludy skies and temps right around 70. So, from a weather perspective, we were ahead already!
Joining me yesterday were Rick and Rick…that made it easy to remember names but hard to distinguish between guys when we needed to do something. This trip was Rick’s birthday present to himself. Rick wanted two things out of the trip: some information about HOW to fish Lake Wissota for himself, and a bunch of fish for his buddy Rick. While we didn’t put on a walleye clinic by any means, I think we were able to accomplish both goals.
Birthday boy Rick is shown above with our third nice-sized cat of the year, a 26″ fish that tipped the scales just below 9 lbs. We were fishing 1/16 oz jigs with bait on a midriver rockpile when this fish came calling. We snapped a few photos and sent her on her way.
We struggled to put together a consistent pattern for walleyes yesterday. We popped two fish pulling leadcore right out of the gates, and then didn’t get another fish on core the rest of the day. We long-lined cranks over the boulders for a few more fish, but that was also a short-lived bite. We found a few fish pitching to shallow rocks and sand, including our two cats and our largest walleye which was just (JUST) below 18″. We found a few more dragging bait on light jigs, both on mid-river sand flats and shallow sand near the area where the Chip spills into the lake. We ended the day with somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 walleyes, with about half in the slot and the rest under. No bigguns today, and we had a hard time finding Wissota eaters (13 3/4)..it seemed as though our fish were either 16-17″ or 10-12″. We also had two cats, 2 pike, and a smallmouth or two.
Thanks Rick and Rick for spending the day with me!
Thanks for the report Jason.