Door County Brown Trout fishing 2007

The 2007 spring brown trout fishing trip went off fine without a hitch so to speak. A few minor mishaps that cost us some lures and a dinged up prop on the Yamaha T8 trolling motor. But, other than that, everyone made it home relatively unscathed with quite a bit of fish to boot. Most of it will be used for summer grilling or it will end up in the smoker and then shared with family and friends alike with some beer or a glass of wine or two.

Nancy came up for the first two days and brought our two dogs (Finley and Kayla) with her. Dick Straub rode in my truck with the boat in tow. The first day was just for relaxing. A hike with the dogs and casting some spoons off shore was a great way for all of us to get the kinks out after a 5 hour ride up to our cabin in Baileys Harbor on the Door county peninsula.

We didn’t try to get up early on the second day either. If I remember right, we hit the waters on the Green Bay side near the city of Sturgeon Bay around 9:00am. Fishing was slow for the most part but we did manage two by later in the afternoon. The bigger ran 25" long and was caught on a F7 blue rapala ran 120′ behind our Off Shore planer board.

Nancy joined us later in the afternoon and she got a crack at two more fish but landed neither one. The first bit off the lure (probably a pike) and the second came off just seconds before Dick could slide the net under it.

Back at the cabin later that night, the first of several mishaps for the week occurred with out much warning. Dick had reached into one of the cupboards and pulled out several heavy pans and was turning around to ask Nancy which one we should use to cook up some vittles. Nancy had been walking over towards Dick in her bare feet when Dick lost his grip on the heaviest one and the bottom corner of the pot landed squarely in the middle of her little toe. In no time flat, her little toe was looking like a malformed piece of fruit. We finally managed to ease her pain with a large bag of ice and several 12oz liquid medicinal pain relievers. You could tell the liquid pain relievers were working fairly good by the reduced frequency with which she was yelling "Ouch"! The rest of us would have been yelling something else, but that’s not her style. Dick on the other hand was sentenced to not only cooking dinner, but also cleaning up afterwards for his failure to maintain his grip on the bone crushing cooking pot, all of which he did with a rather meek and helpless look on his face.

Monday morning, April 16th Dick and I launched the boat from the landing at Peninsula State Park into Eagle Harbor near the the town of Ephraim at a bright and early 8:30am. We were trying to save our energy for later in the week when the tournament started.

Dumb move!

Blue bird skies were clear and bright, not a cloud in sight and a light wind put no more than a ripple on the water. Literally a brown trout fisherman’s second worse night mare. The first being ridiculously high winds that would prevent all but the craziest nuts from even launching a boat.

On these windless, bright sunny days, you”ve got about two hours in the early morning to put some fish in the boat. After that, your just out there working on your sun tan and hoping you run across a fish that’s dumber than you are.

Guess what? We found one of those big dumb fish in 45′ of water at 10 minutes before noon and caught it by running a F9 blue rapala six feet behind a 1/2oz keel sinker. We set the rig to run 40′ behind the planer board when this 10.8lb, 28" long brown trout hit. The next 15 minutes were pure adrenaline and the feeling carried over for several more minutes even after the fish was in the live well. Its a feeling that true fisherman can never get enough of and it keeps us coming back for more year after year.

High fives were traded and lines put back out signaled the end of one battle while anticipation over the next one began immediately. Unfortunately for us, the next fish was not going to bite today anymore despite the fact that we trolled up and down many different spots on the Green Bay side of the peninsula. We worked waters by Egg Harbor, Horse Shoe Bay and even the Monument Shoals reefs to no avail. By the end of the day, all we had to look forward to was a long boat ride back to the landing and six more days of brown trout fishing. Didn’t seem all that bad really!

Tuesday was more of the same in the morning hours. We launched out of Moonlight Bay on the Michigan side of the Peninsula and despite some very light rain and a mild north wind, the morning went by without a bite.

At 10 minutes after noon though we finally hooked into another fish. This one fought straight back behind the board with no jumping and no long runs. Dick didn’t seem to care at all and was enjoying the fact that something was once again pulling on the other end of the line. In much less time than it would take to land a similar size brown trout, he had pulled in a nice 27-1/4" northern..

This would turn out to be the only fish on our entire trip that was not a brown trout. That in itself is a little rare. Usually, we pull in several pike and smallies on each of these spring fishing trips despite not trying for them.

A little while later and it was my turn again. This time a chunky 23-1/2" brown tried to eat our F9 black rapala and found itself swimming around in our livewell instead.

We picked up Larry "Doc" Pakyz at the pier around 3:30PM and he waited less than and hour to pull in his first brown trout of the year. A nice fat 25 incher which also fell for a F9 black rapala trolled 120′ behind the board. Later in the evening, Dick finished off the day with a 19" brown that will be perfect on the grill this summer.

Over supper that night, we all agreed that the "Flats" off the Sturgeon Bay shipping canal was the place we needed to be tomorrow. We had a couple of great days out there last year and were anxious to see if we could duplicate our previous years success.

We launched the boat around 8:30 or 9:00 am from the new boat ramp at the Stone Quarry. No one was quite ready to start getting up really early just yet I guess. That would come soon enough once the tournament started on Friday.

Air temps were in the upper 30’s and would warm up to the mid-40’s by the middle of the afternoon. Occasional light rain and a nice wind blew out of the north at about 15mph. We sent out six lines and started trolling over one of the trails on the GPS produced from the year before. Only one problem, the winds blew out of the south, southeast last year. Which meant that it really wasn’t all that windy on the north side of the flats where we were and on top of that, surface water temperatures were running a chilly 38 degrees. We hadn’t even finished our first trolling pass when the decision was made to pull all the lines. The other side of the bay would have waves running about 3′ or so and they would be washing along and into the shoreline of the Potawatomi State park .The lines came up and off we went.

Sure enough we found warmer, (43 degrees) dirtier water immediately upon our arrival. Even though none of us had spent anytime trolling for brown trout along this shoreline before, the conditions before us made for a feeling of good things to come.

And come they did! Between 10:30am and 3:30PM we landed nine brown trout. Some came on flat lines run 120′ behind the boards and others on the keel lines run just 40′ behind the boards. We caught them out of 12′ of water and we caught them out of 30′ of water. On days like this, it seems like there are fish everywhere, almost daring you to put a rapala out there so they can try and tear it off the end of your line.

The biggest brown came in at 27-1/2" long and weighed 11.2lbs and the smallest was 19 inches.

What a blast when you finally get perfect weather and the fish seemed to be waiting, ready and willing. It’s days like this that stay in your memory for years to come.

The only real mishap happened after the fishing had slowed down. I was trying to coax one more to take a swipe at our lures by running our lines real close to the shoreline. Even though the boat was in 13′ of water, we suddenly found ourselves trolling directly over several extremely large boulders. Worse yet, they topped out just a foot or so below the surface. To late to avoid a direct hit on the trolling motor. I had taken a sharp turn away from shore in my haste to get away from those boulders, but all that did was put the three inside lines on a direct course for the same rocks we hit with the trolling motor. All three snagged up and by the time we reeled them in, not a one had a lure on it anymore. Guess big rocks are better at tearing off rapalas than brown trout are!

Doc thought I might have managed to put a little more pitch in the T8 yamaha’s prop than was standard from the factory. Later we found out that he was indeed correct in that prediction.

Thursday, April 19nth and the cloudy skies and north wind from the day before were now gone. Sunny skies greeted us once again The day before the Baileys Harbor Brown Trout tournament was to begin and the weatherman was predicting sunnier skies and a change in wind direction for the next several days. This meant that our hotspot from the day before would be pretty much useless during the tournament. The winds were going to switch to the south, southeast but that wasn’t suppose to happen until sometime on Friday and it would take at least a day of blowing for another good bite to set up on the opposite shoreline.

We agreed to spend a little more time fishing the hot shoreline from the day before. With the changing weather, this area would be pretty much useless by the time the tournament started tomorrow anyway. Dick was happy we did, especially after catching a trout weighing in at 9.8lbs and measuring 26 inches long. After that, only one more short fish came to the boat this morning.

Our game plan for the afternoon was to fish and learn new water. So we headed out of the shipping canal in Sturgeon Bay to fish the shorelines on the Lake Michigan side of the Peninsula. Many big fish have come from these waters in tournaments past. Some big enough to win it all. Today, we were going to find out what was out there.

What we found mostly was miles and miles of good looking structure running some what parallel to the shoreline. Out went the lines and down the shoreline we went, creating a trail that paralleled the 10′ breakline as close as possible. By 3:00PM we had put two more fish in the boat. Both were good grilling size fish. Another words, they would taste good, but they weren’t going to win us any money in the tournament.

The area looked good though and the winds would be hitting this shoreline tomorrow if the weatherman’s predictions stayed true. So we decided to time how long it would take us to get back to our cabin starting from the moment we started to pull lines. One and a half hours later, we were back in the cabin. It was going to be and early morning tomorrow if we wanted to have our lures in the water at the break of dawn.

At 3:00am on Friday morning, everyone was up and scurrying around. Lunches and gear were loaded up and off we went. Sure enough, by the break of dawn, our lines were already in the water and by 5:45am, we had our first fish on already. A pretty nice 24-1/2 incher. A good start but we still had a ways to go. Unfortunately, the winds didn’t blow and no clouds came. Bright, blue skies grew brighter by the hour and by midmorning, we had slid out to deeper water and began running our lines deeper in the ultra clear waters of Lake Michigan. By 10:30am, we could see the ripples in the sand on the bottom of the lake in 35′ of water.

This was bad! Time for a new plan. We headed back over to the Sturgeon Bay flats for a little while but didn’t find anything that looked good over there either. Up came the lines again and back to the boat ramp. We decided to finish off the day in Moonlight Bay where we had picked up at least one decent fish while prefishing. By the end of the end of the afternoon, we managed to pull two more grillers into the boat. Doc’s fish made the board at the weigh in but none of us were sure it would stay there by the end of the tournament. The only good news was the wind finally did start to kick up out of the south, southeast by the middle of the afternoon.

Saturday morning and we were all up by 3:15am and we still managed to get all our lines in the water before the crack of dawn. We were back out on the Lake Michigan side of the Sturgeon Bay shipping canal. After and hour or so of trolling with no bites, we decided to take a chance. The structure on the map looked good a few miles down the shoreline. We never made it down that far the day before, but we felt like we needed to take a chance and go for it. Up came the lines and off we went.

Three or four miles later, we slowed down and got everything set up once again. After trolling for a mile or so, a big fish hit our 2nd line out on the starboard side and didn’t stop until it had peeled off another 130′ of line. The offshore planer board looked like a bobber for a while there.

To be safe, Dick and I pulled in all the other lines. Even the ones on the outside of the one where Doc was fighting the big fish. This was fairly easy to do since the fish was so far away from the boat. After a 15 minute fight, I finally slid the net under a dandy 29" long brown trout and pulled her into the boat. That put a smile on everyone’s face. With the wind now blowing at about 15mph and waves running around 2 to 3′, we all felt like there were more fish out there to be caught.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get another hit until almost 4:00PM and even though that fished measured a very respectable 27 inches, it was quite possibly the skinniest brown trout I’ve ever seen.

Dang thing only weighed 6.6lbs! A few days ago Doc caught a 26-1/2" fish that tipped the scales at 10.3lbs.

We fished until 6:00PM or so and then we had to get going. By the time we got back to the weigh in station in Baileys Harbor, it would be well after dark.

The bigger fish put us in 15nth place but Docs fish from the day before was knocked off the board completely. Boy did we have our work cut out for us with only a half day to go.

The winds looked good though and I thought Sunday morning was going to be the best day of the tournament. Things can change quickly though, and little did I know that our plans were about to be changed once again.

Nancy’s dad had come down with some serious medical problems and landed in the hospital. Nancy was down in Madison trying to take care of her Mom, who is in a wheel chair, and both dogs at the same time. Gut check time can come when you least expect it! She didn’t really want me to come home until after the tournament, but trolling around trying to catch a big fish while your wife is busting her butt and getting stressed out wasn’t going to give me any peace of mind.

The guys took it pretty well and the next morning we slept in till 7:00, then packed everything up and headed south. This years brown trout trip was over and looking back at it, we got nothing to complain about!

Joel "Boog" Ballweg