Opener on Winnie/Cutfoot

What other words can you describe the 08 fishing opener except absolutely amazing. Spending time in the boat with my dad along with weather consisting of rain, snow, wind, ice along with a big fish bite that had your arms sore at the end of the day made the 08 opener one I will never forget. We boated approximetly around 150 fish over the weekend, and daily we landed around 30 fish between 24-26 inches. Getting fish under 17 inches was really tough as we ended up with 7 keepers for the table, but when your on a quality fish bite like this you will get no complaints out of me. Here is on of the many nice eyes that fell victim to a jig and minnow.

We started our day out at 5 A.M. jigging shiners up shallow in 7 ft. of water, it only took about 15 minutes to put 3 fish in the box and as soon as it was light enough to see your line the smaller fished seemed to disappear and the bigger fish proceeded to go nuts. We didn’t seem to notice a color preference or a preference in bait. On Saturday we went through a gallon on shiners so we switched to rainbows and it didn’t make a bit of difference unless you were on the lake. Out on the lake if we didn’t fish with shiners the bite was tough for us, our presentation was simple basically jigging 1/16 or 1/8 oz. jigs of any color around 7 to 20 ft. and you were on fish. I did notice alot of schooling, we found 100 yard stretches completely loaded with fish relating to structure and we concentrated on those areas and found that to be very effective. We pulled some lindy rigs in the deeper water and found the same sucess as jigging, we noticed it really didn’t matter what you put in front of them as long as you stayed on those concentrated areas relating to the structure. Here is another nice eye that fell victim to a lindy rig.

On Sunday the weather was alot nicer, I was working a shallow point and while I was taking off a fish my trolling motor drifted me into 37 ft. of water. I looked down at my 332 C and was quite suprised. This is a very good feeling when you a graf that looks like this.

One of my favorite ways to fish is trolling, when my graph looks like that you can bet I will be putting on some cranks and making a pass through. I figured with 45 degree water temps I should use a small crank and go slow, guess what I was wrong. We ended up running #7 shad raps in natural colors at around 1.6 mph and put several nice eyes in the boat. Here is my dad getting cranky with some cutfoot eyes. This opener was completely awesome, big fish hitting on several presentations. If you are looking for a good bite I don’t think Winnie will dissapoint you.

Tight lines,

Joey