Wagon Train, NE – Fishing Report from Sept. 2

It was a cool and rainy start to a beautiful holiday weekend in eastern Nebraska. I was able to get in a few hours of fishing at Wagon Train on Saturday morning and managed to have the entire lake to myself for a while on one of the busiest weekends of the year.

It started out to be the perfect morning with cloudy skies and a light breeze out of the north. The temperature was in the upper 50’s with rain on the way. I haven’t caught a walleye for several weeks and decided to pull my new favorite crank baits the Berkley Flicker Shad. With the recent rains and sudden drop in our temperatures the last couple of weeks the vegitation has died back dramatically. This has caused the water to get very murky making it nearly impossible to see a chartruse crank bait even 8 inches under the water. I decided to start out with one dark colored bait and one bright colored bait. Things started out very slow. In the first three hours or so I only caught 4 small bass and 1 nice bass. No walleye.

Around 11:00 I was finally joined by my cousin Pete and a steady rain. The rain chased the two other boats off the lake and we now had it to ourselves. Adding a couple more poles really helped out. We used the dark baits and the bright baits both. I can’t say that one was working better than the other. Right away we had a double on and came up with two more small bass. It seemed that every time the rain would come down hard we would catch a fish. The harder it rained the bigger the fish would get too.

We had to call it a day around 2:00. We both had places to be for the weekend with family and friends. It was a great day to be out and although we didn’t boat a walleye the bass sure showed us a good time. We were really hoping for a bonus muskie but were unable to connect.