Lake Wisconsin Late Fall Sauger Fishing

Last weeks special from Lake Wisconsin was a dandy 44″ Northern Pike. This weeks special is the biggest dang Channel Cat I’ve ever caught. Unfortunately, I still don’t have an accurate scale in my boat. So let the guessing begin once again on actual weight.
I actually caught two of these channel cats while jigging for walleyes and saugers. One was caught on a B3 blade bait and the other was caught on a jig & minnow. The spots where we come across cats are usually a bit deeper (at lest 20 plus feet) and many times full of snags. And because many of these spots are full of snags, we don’t always land them. I hooked into another beast that never gave me a chance at all. It simply ran me straight thru a tree stump and that was the end of that.

Since this is a sauger fishing report, I’ll get back to the original intent. I had a four day weekend and this report is going to work backwards starting from Sunday and going thru last week Thursday.

Sunday, November 11th

The last of my four day weekend was here already. How come four days of fishing always seems to go by about 3 times as fast as four days of work! Somebody should do something about that!
Today I was once again sharing my boat with a couple of repeat customers who I very much enjoy fishing with. Dick Majcher and Rob Linde have done pretty well in their previous outings with me. Dick has done especially well and he has kind of made a habit of out fishing Rob pretty badly. Doesn’t seem to matter whether we’re fishing for crappies or walleyes either, Dick usually manages to put some mighty fine fish in the boat along the way. And like many good fisherman, Dick always brings along a bag full of tricks to try.
But today was going to be different. It wasn’t evident early on but as the day wore on, it became increasingly evident that today, it was going to be all Rob and nothing but Rob! I did manage to sneak a fish or two in here and there, but for the most part, it was all Rob today.
I think it was that 20 year old hand painted jig that I gave him early in the day. He never took the dang thing off. At one point, after an especially nasty snag finally gave up its deathly hold on the jig, Rob considered retying the Fireline Crystal line just in case it had become weakend. But he decided that was taking a pretty big chance and since the knot had held tight despite several nasty snags, he decided to trust it. Good choice to because it never did fail all day long!
Mean while, Dick and I were busy trying to find the hot bait. Plastics of all sorts were dropped over board to no avail. Blades of many colors were jerked up and down repeatedly! That wasn’t working either. Back to the jig and minnow we went. Only thing was, that didn’t work nearly as well for us as it did for Rob. Oddly enough, Rob was sitting in the back of the boat. Now I’ve seen one guy get hot before and catch most of the fish, but it seems like nine times out of ten, the guy who’s hot is sitting in the front of the boat where he can get first crack at em.
We didn’t find our fish on any one spot today either. Instead, we used the run and gun technique. Almost every spot we went to would give up one fish, then nothing more. So, on to the next spot we went.
It took a lot of moving around but by the end of the day, we ended up with a total of 15 walleyes and saugers. Nine of them were in the legal slot range and one more was over 20″ long. Guess who caught that one?
Nice job today Rob! Very impressive indeed. I’ll see the two of you again this Friday and we’ll see if your hot streak is still alive.

Saturday, November 10th

Today was a lot like yesterday. Not a lot of fish but some real quality saugers.
Ed and Joe Orlowski were my guest for the day and the morning started out on a really bad note.
Heavy fog and cold weather were contributing factors but a bigger factor was my inability to back up a boat straight. Somehow, I managed to smack the fender on my boat trailer into a solid steel post which was erected in front of the pier to keep knuckle heads like me from backing one wheel of their trailer into the water and the other one on top of the pier. I guess that doesn’t work to well either but we’ll probably never know. I do know that you can quickly reduce one solid, plastic wheel well fender into several smaller pieces in a hurry if your not careful enough to avoid hitting that big, yellow post! We finally did get my big, white lund floating next to the pier without further damage to the vehicles, pier or post.
We then slowly headed out for some fishing. And I do mean slowly! The fog was very heavy and it took us around a half hour to go from Sunset Bay down to the south point of Weigands Bay. Once there, we were not going anywhere else until the fog lifted either. The fog actually got worse and it didn’t lift until around 10:00am or so. That wasn’t good either because we were not exactly lighting the world on fire. Joe did managed to put one 20″ plus sauger in the boat but I also heard later from several other people that they were doing pretty good up by the bridge. Arrgh!
After the fog lifted we hit a couple of the humps but they didn’t produce anything for us so we headed up to the bridge next. We spent most of the afternoon working that area over pretty hard and it kind of paid off for us. Ed and I each caught fat saugers that went over 20″ long.
By the end of the day, we came in with a total of 5 walleyes and 7 saugers. Three in the keeper range and three more over 20″ long.
Not bad but like I said, I did hear from several people who did quite a bit better. I’m pretty sure they were just trying to make me feel better though.
Thanks Guys!

Friday, November 9th

Roger Howard is a very lucky guy! Not so much because he got to go fishing with me today but more because he has every single Friday off for the rest of the year. I don’t know how he managed to do that, but I’m pretty envious to say the least.
Roger and his wife, Marcia are the other half of our couple’s league bowling team. Last November I got Roger out in the boat for some walleye and sauger fishing on Lake Wisconsin. Mostly, all he did was net my fish for me. This year, I returned the favor by netting all of his big saugers for him.
We didn’t put that many fish in the boat today, but the ones we did were quality fish.
To be fair, I was working over some new water just to see what I could find. We didn’t find many walleyes or saugers but I did run into the biggest dang channel cat I’ve ever caught. Unfortunately, I forgot to measure it before throwing it back. We did get some photo’s though so no one can accuse me of making up fish stories. The big cat hit a jig/minnow combo in about 21′ of water. It was pretty obvious right away that this was not walleye. But it wasn’t a long, dragged out fight either. For some reason, this fish swam off to the back side of the boat and then came straight up. After a failed attempt or two to net it, Roger did finally get the whole fish into the net. I couldn’t really blame him for missing it the first time since it barely fit into the net to begin with.
We spent the rest of the day switching back and forth from blades to jigs. I think at one point, I probably had about a dozen or so different colored blades and another half dozen different colored jigs laying around the front end of the boat. And none of them were working very well at all. Unless you call catching white bass working well!
Roger on the other hand kept slugging in out with about three different colors of blades and jigs. About every hour or so, he would pull in another fish including two nice saugers that went over 20 inches long. For a guy who only fishes a couple of times each year, Roger sure did give me a lesson today.
Thanks a lot buddy! Maybe next year I’ll have to take somebody else along on your fall fishing trip.
Just kidding Roger. I had a great time and it doesn’t bother me one bit if you out fished me.
Just as long as it never happens again!