I’m with Jason and if we have a choice of flavors I’d like a swirl cone please. I used to use the number and size of the fish I caught as the determining factors of how much fun I had. Now I’d rather meet new people and have a bunch of 2 minute conversations as your boats pass. Laugh a little, talk a little smack, and who know, perhaps make some new friends. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather catch fish than not catch fish but that’s no longer a requirement. Now for a report. I’ve been down there every weekend since the beginning of February. I got schooled on the finer points of catching for quite a while. Did a little experimenting and changing things up a touch and there you go, fish started coming over the side of the boat. As was mentioned by Ripjiggen things change on the river and what worked yesterday (or an hour ago) won’t necessarily work now. What worked for me the last time out was dragging a dubuque at .4 -.5 upstream and about .2 faster than the current downstream. I’ve been using green B-Fishn paddle tails, moxi’s and flukes. Depths were anywhere from 12′ down to 28′. I had my best success just holding the bait still 95% of the time only dropping the rod tip back to locate bottom. Little changes can make a big difference so if something’s not working and you’re marking fish change things up a little before you start up the big motor and run to the next group of boats.

I unfortunately have had mixed experiences. I will definitely say the people there are friendly and the bait that we buy there tries as hard to catch fish as any bait I’ve ever used. The only poor experience I had was earlier this fall they were a half hour late opening up. We were fishing the second day of a tournament and ran out of bait on day 1. Tried running there after day 1 weigh-in but they were already closed. Evert’s only had small chubs which didn’t do the trick pre-fishing so our option was to show up at 4-seasons and wait for them to open. Ease-off was @ 7am and the sign indicated they were to open at 6:30. At 7am someone came rolling in the parking lot to open up. Oh well, lost a half hour of tournament time. This would never bother me if I were just fishing for the sake of fishing. To quote a Beatles song “Ah na na na life goes on”. Not going to stop fishing and not going to stop going to 4-seasons.

Scott Goodale
Mike Horning

Scott Goodale and Mike Horning