Upper Lake Wisconsin Weekend Sauger Fishing Report

What do you do when you have Friday off from work and the weathers actually fairly nice outside? That’s pretty easy, you go fishing!

The early morning temperatures aren’t much of a problem if you don’t arrive at the boat landing until 10:00AM. Yea, we got a bit of a late start today, but neither one of us was in any hurry. My goals for the day were to do some scouting for my guide trip tomorrow and have fun catching a few fish along the way. Mission accomplished on both fronts!
Buck and I hit one of my favorite spots for about 3 hours and landed four or five saugers by vertical jigging both live bait and plastics. A plain jig/minnow combo caught most of our fish but once again, the bigger saugers fell to a jig/plastic combo. A B-Fish-N Tackle firecracker/chartreuse paddle tail rigged on a chartreuse jig head caught several of the best fish.
Buck could only fish till 1:00PM, but that was long enough for him to pick up three eaten size saugers to take home for the table.
After dropping him off, I started jumping around from spot to spot, hoping to find several more good locations for tomorrow. Two other spots did reveal some possibilities and by 5:00PM in the afternoon, I felt confident that we would be able to put some decent fish in the boat.
For the day, I ended up with seven saugers and two walleyes. Only two fish were less than 15″ long. One went 20″ long, two more at 19-1/2″ long and the rest were between 15-1/2″ and 18″ long. All except the three that Buck took home were released.

Saturday 3-29-08 on Upper Lake Wisconsin

At 5:45AM, I met Casey Liakos, Brian Wolosek & Jason Konz outside Sauk Prairie Bait & Tackle. Traveling and fishing new destinations is something these guys have done together before. The week prior, two of them spent time on the Fox river in Depere, Wisconsin sampling some of the fine early season walleye fishing available in that area. This would be there first time fishing on the waters of Lake Wisconsin and one of the goals Casey mentioned when he set this trip up was to catch at least one really big sauger.

After launching the boat, we motored off to one of my favorite stretches on this part of the river. The area we were fishing is just above where the river opens up into Lake Wisconsin. Everyone baited up a 3/8oz jig with a large fathead minnow and dropped it overboard and the first drift began. I actually expected us to land at least one or two fish on the first drift, but that did not happen. A second drift produced a lost fish for Brian and shortly after, Casey showed me a minnow that looked like it had been skinned alive. How some of these fish missed getting hooked when they do that, I’ll never know. All the guys were using stinger hooks, but for some reason, the fish kept winning in the early morning hours.

We moved on to our next spot where a dozen other boats appeared to be doing pretty good by dragging double jig rigs upstream. After one quick drift down stream and another lost fish, I quickly rigged up all the guys with double jig rigs and we began dragging them upstream. Half way through our run, Casey hooked and landed our first fish of the day. A dandy, fat & sassy 21″ long sauger that was quickly photographed and released. Very shortly after that, Jason hooked into a good fish and got it up to the surface where we saw only a flash before it to came unbuttoned and disappeared.

This was beginning to look like one of those days where hard luck seemed to be getting the best of us. One thing I noticed early on about these guys though, was none of them seemed all that worried or bothered by missed fish or lost fish. Instead, they just kept fishing while cracking a joke here and there along the way.

We varied our speeds from .4 to .7mph but didn’t really seem to find one particular speed that was better. Keeping your jigs on the bottom was the most important part. If you did that, and if you had on the right colors, then you got bit. The best colors this morning appeared to be any kind of chartreuse tail behind a 1/4oz orange jig head. The double jig rigs we used were nothing more than a three way rig. The first 1/4oz jig is tied with about a 15″ lead and the second one is tied with about a 30″ lead.

The second spot fizzled out shortly after that and it appeared as though we may have missed out on a good early morning bite that occurred here as well. To little, to late! The only way to correct that is to keep on trying so off we went to find some more active fish.

We spent some more time in other locations dragging double jig rigs and vertical jigging with little or no success. It appeared to me as though this was going to be a slow day overall so I decided to break out the trolling rods and attempt to scrape out a fish here and there as best we could. The rest of the day was spent slow trolling various rigs upstream. I don’t think we caught more than one fish on any one pass but we did catch enough decent fish to keep us going. We would make a pass, then switch baits as we motored back to our start point.
The fish we did catch were almost all very nice sized female saugers. The guys could have kept a couple of them, but because they were all full of eggs, they decided to release them. The only short fish we caught was a 14″ walleye.
All in all, it ended up being a fun day on the water. We had to work for our fish, but they were there and could at least be tempted into biting if you were persistent.
Casey, Brian and Jason, it was a pleasure to meet and fish with you three amigos’s. Take care and good luck out there!

Boog