A friend of mine, Aron, who guides over in the Apostle Islands started shooting me texts this past week with pictures of some big bad brown trout and the simple message… Get out here!
Now if you’ve never hooked up with one of these drag pulling machines in shallow water on the short rods before you might think planning out a 4 hr 1 way trip on just a couple days notice is crazy, but once you’ve experienced the rush of fighting one of these water wolves you’d think it was crazy not to find a way to make it work.
Which gets me to why I love being a part of this website so much… Meeting others who are just as addicted to fishing as myself so when my friends back home weren’t crazy enough to take Friday off and join me on short notice just a few quick messages and phone calls exchanged with friends I’ve met through IDO and I was meeting Jakob Hals to hit the road at 3:30 AM Friday morning.
We met Aron at 7:30 and hit the water but were greeted with a mini cold front as the weather gods were messing with us again and warm temps predicted earlier in the week had turned into single digits with wind and snow… And the fish noticed too as big mark after big mark came scooting off the bottom only to hold up below our baits slowly sink back down. A few location changes and plenty of holes later we had coaxed several Splake and whitefish into taking our offering but our VMC Rattle Spoons and Rapala Rippin’ Raps that had been getting crushed earlier in the week had largely been ignored.
Greeted with much warmer weather on Saturday Jakob and I made a plan while sipping gas station coffee on the way to the lake to stay even mobile and no matter how many fish were were seeing if they didn’t bite we would keep moving… And it finally paid off on our 5th spot as we finally found some active fish willing to commit. It was still a grind but the excitement of just a few nice trout made the last minute trip all worthwhile. We never did catch any of the giants that Aron was into earlier in the week but even just the scenery makes this one of the more special places that I’ve had the opportunity to fish.
A big thanks to Aron Kastern for giving us the invite and to Jakob for being crazy enough to drop everything and join me on a last minute adventure!