Quick Otter Tail Update

Been a busy ‘work’ week at Vacationland this week, gearing up for another full house this weekend, followed by the busy summer vacation season…..are you ready? The weather has been great this week and the weekend forecast looks awesome as well. Hopefully my camera will be busy again! Just one ‘bigger’ fish pic this week as the weekend featured more of a ‘eater’ bite. But, guest Ron Fuchs managed to entice this nice 25″ eyeball to inhale his spot tail shiner so he could claim ‘big fish honors’ for the weekend. Congrats Ron!

As I mentioned, a lot of eater fish were boated last weekend. Numbers weren’t ‘amazing’, but nobody zeroed either. Alot of 4-5 fish catches were common, and the smell of beer battered fish fry’s enveloped the confines of the resort Saturday evening.

The majority of our guests this past weekend spent their hours on the water trolling lindy rigs & spot tail shiners along shoreline breaks and gravel flats. Popular depths seemed to be 16-22 fow, deeper than I would expect, but hey, these guys were putting fish in the boat and I’m sitting on shore, so who am I to judge. They also endured some ‘crazy’ weather Saturday morning, as a freakish storm emerged and let go 80 mph winds for approx 20-30 minutes. 8-10 ft waves swamped a handful of boats fishing a tournament on OT, but once the winds calmed, fishing was reported to be excellent. The winning team boated a 2-day total of just over 36lbs, proving again the quality of the fish in Otter Tail. Many tournament fisherman were fishing shallow water (4-8ft), rip jigging spot tail shiners. So basically, the fish are everywhere, you just need to be on the water to catch them! Notice in this pic the busted tree in the background which landed on a guests car…..ouch!!

Last weekend was my first weekend as a ‘rookie’ resort owner in which I faced a little adversity as well. The aforementioned storm had everyone in camp a little concerned as the lake became fierce and trees and limbs started falling. Fortunately, our clean-up was minimal compared to others. Then that same evening, another storm caused a power outage for roughly 7 hours, causing me to lose the majority of my shiner minnow supply…live and learn I guess. This last pic is of my dad receiving an ‘award’ from the Fuchs group from SE Minn. as they say ‘thanks’ for putting up with them for the last 10 yrs! A great group of guys and part of the reason that owning a resort can be a great occupation. Until next week……