Wisconsin River below Dells Dam

Weekend of March 18nth

Well it looks like I’ve finally got everything squared away with the boat. I limped through the last two weeks of the season last year. My 175hp Evinrude developed a severe short and the net result was a dead battery right around the middle of the day on the last couple of fishing trips in 2007. It took awhile to find the problem, but it appears to be fixed now. The good fellows at Don’s Marine in Lodi worked closely with representatives from Bombardier. In the end, remapping the engines computer solved the problem.

We did put the boat out on the water this past weekend below the Dells dam. Dewey Schultz and I went out on Saturday from 10am to 5:30pm and Dick Straub came along on Sunday.

Fishing was a bit slower than I would have liked, but it was really great to be back on the water.

During the morning hours, frozen foam on the surface would catch your line and pull the jig or minnow rig off the bottom. This made fishing two lines at once nearly impossible. By noon though, with the sun warming things up a bit, that problem disappeared.

Dewey and I spent the morning casting ringworms on 1/8oz jigs up to the shoreline well downstream from the dam on Saturday. Last year, in the very early spring we caught some nice walleyes with this technique, but on this morning at least, that’s not what they wanted.

Then we switched to slow trolling stick baits behind bottom bouncers for an hour or two. This has also produced some very nice fish for me in the past. But on this day, the walleyes were not interested.

Around 2:00pm, we moved up to the dam and began vertical jigging with a plain jig & minnow On our second line, we put 1/8oz slip sinkers ahead of a lindy rig and let out just enough line to keep the rig on the bottom, using the the electric motor to slowly work our way around the numerous 10-16′ break lines and humps. It took awhile, but Dewey finally caught our first fish on a chartreuse jig tipped with a minnow. A nice, fat 21" walleye which we quickly photographed and released. Dewey popped a few more smaller fish on that rig before I finally pulled in two 15" fish on the lindy rig. A few more shorties followed them in on that same rig.

And that’s pretty much the way the day ended. All fish were released today.

On Sunday, Dick and I started out at the dam using the same rigs. Things were very slow when we first arrived at around 10:30am. The lindy rig finally produced a 19-1/4" walleye and over the next hour or so, Dick and I boated several more shorties on that same rig.

We had intended to listen to the Badger men’s basketball team on the radio, but when your sitting in a boat on the Wisconsin river below the Dells dam, your basically encased between steep canyon walls and reception is non-existent.

I wanted to try a few more techniques yet anyway, so we pulled up our lines and headed downstream.

First, we tried anchoring on the edge of a current eddy but since I only had one anchor in the boat, this proved futile. After a little while, you feel kind of like a bug circling the drain in a sink!

So up came the anchor and out went the bow mount trolling motor. I used a 3/8oz jig & minnow to pop our first fish while working the current seam between the main current and a back eddy. A nice 16" eaten size walleye. A little later, Dick lost a very nice fish just below the surface when the light wire hook bent out slightly during the fight. Normally, I would have been using a walleye or octopus style hook, but do to the extremely slow bite, I had switched to smaller, fine wire hooks.

A few more short fish found there way into the boat as we listened to the Badgers bow out of the NCAA tournament.

After the game, we went back to casting 1/8oz jigs tipped with various plastics to the shorelines as we drifted down stream, using the electric motor to control our drift speed. This is one of my favorite ways to catch walleyes in the early spring. Unfortunately, we didn’t catch anymore walleyes on this pleasant afternoon.

It was a very peaceful and enjoyable day out there. It would have been okay if a few more fish had interrupted us, but that’s fishing and we were glad to be able to spend a day on the river casting away, drifting down stream and listening to the sounds of the lower Wisconsin riverway. Ducks, cranes and other wild life mixed in with the sounds of the river.

Another open water fishing season is underway. I hope its a memorable one for all of you.

Boog