Thanks for your response Jon! I’ll give them a try…. If it ends up setting me back $600 I may invest in a new motor…….

Well, I went Catfishing as promised … and here’s a brief caption of my day/afternoon/evening …. you’ll find this quite entertaining.

Started off with leaving my buddies house just south of Osceola… Stopped at Russels Bait Shop in Star Prairie…. my buddy realizing he had forgotten his wallet (Wonderful). Come to find out they are nearly out of Sucker Minnows and we had to take the final pickings. 6-8 miles down the road … POOOOOF! Yup…. there went the drivers side tire on the trailer! As I look back I see the remnants of the tire bouncing down the road (and catch the lid off our (dry storage container) flying off into the roadway (closely followed by a car and you can imagine what happened to the lid). Pull over…. No spare, arrange for someone to drop off a tire (leaving us sitting there on the road for what felt like an eternity). Get the spare on… start driving…..well I’ll be damned! The spare is going flat! We barely make it to the boat launch. Launch the boat (Somerset Landing South of Osceola). Toodling down the river and EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRR…………..PUT! What the ???? was that? Oh … nothing more then the engine SIEZING UP. Guess the impeller wasn’t working to hot? That’s alright… just a cheap $2000 engine … and we all have $2000 laying around to throw in the water. Let’s try the trolling moter (god knows it’s not enough to fight the current and get us back upstream to the boat launch). Might as well keep heading south. Find us a place and set up camp. Call a buddy to “put in” north of Stillwater and come get us in the morning. Needless to say we caught “0” fish. Got rained on! Storms about blew the tent from beneath us. Buddy finally gets us in the morning….tows us back to Stillwater and we drive his vehicle back to WI to get my truck…. needless to say the tire on the trailer is COMPLETELY flat now. Drive 15 minutes back into Somerset to get fix-a-flat and return…. well you know where this is going ………didn’t get any better from there…. and guess what…….I missed work!

I’ll do it again the first chance I get! That’s what I love about fishing!

Mike
AKA Finally on the water

Thanks for the info guys! The flats didn’t sound all to hot to me either … but rumor has it the catfishing has been phenominal in some of the channels just north of the Federal Parks Boat (Zebra Mussel Alert). Apparently they have been catching #15 plus consistantly up there on 6-8″ sucker minnows … It’s worth a try! Going this week … I’ll keep you posted!