It was a fun filled weekend of fishing. One where you do some new fishing. A lot of stories, new and old. And a multi species kind of trip. When all that adds up, it makes for a great weekend!
My wife, Dad and I went to the cabin. Now, this is one of the first times outside of duck hunting that my mom has not been with. She stayed home sick. Not to big of a deal, so we fished Saturday morning. It started pretty slow in some of our spots. I was using a Storm floating crank bait. I used this because of the weeds being so high this time of year. First cast in great grandpa’s spot, he called “the rose bed”, two twitches and boom I had a pike on. After netting and measuring at 24 inches and had a thick girth. It was a nice pike!
After that pike and my wife’s nice little eater bass and a couple of sunnies, we heard back to the cabin. As we were sitting on the porch I was looking through Facebook and saw that a friend was out fishing with her son. The night before she had asked for help to find a new lake close by that had a public dock. They ended up at Pleasant Lake out in Annandale, MN. The picture I saw was her son, who is 6, holding up a beast of a pike! 29 inches and the head looked like an alligator. For anyone this is a nice sized fish, but for that kid, it’s a lifetime memory with great bragging rights. I congratulated him and showed the picture of my smaller pike and said “well he beat mine!” And I’m sure he is hooked for life!
Talking about all the fish stories as the sun was getting lower, we decided to get back on the pontoon. We originally were going over to a lake neighbors to chat, but they were just heading out on a cruise. So we agreed to troll for the rest of the night. This is something we rarely do. We headed to the north side of the lake. As we started, we were catching most of the bottom. The boat was not hooked up to a fish locator so we were just using memory to fish. Then, like a light bulb, I remembered we could use my Navionics App. This was the first time I had used it on a boat. It showed us the ridge line at about 20 ft. We stayed at that and ended up catching a few bass, crappie, and sunnies. As the light started to fall and we hit the area we wanted to, we moved to the south end. Using the App we trolled in the same depth. As we were making our final pass my dad hooks into a fish at the same moment I hook the bottom, I was getting pretty good at that. He starts to reel in as I ask ” do ya got something on?” He says “I’m not sure, it feels like weeds.” I get my mess of weeds back to the boat and look over at his pole, “nope that’s a fish, look at the head shakes it making your pole bounce.” We laugh and my wife is sitting ready with the net. As the fish gets close enough to see, I get excited and yell, “it’s a walleye!” Our net lady scoops it up and we cheer and high five. All of that happened because we had the map and stayed on the ridge.
At the end of the day, we sat proud and talked about the fishing. Dad’s head held high, my wife happy to get out fishing, and me just as excited as a 6 year old with the biggest fish of us life so far. I stop to think about it and between the three of us, we had managed to catch every game species on our lake; walleye, large mouth bass, crappie, sunnies, rock bass, perch, and of coarse a pike. It was such a fun weekend full of stories and new ones had been made. So remember to get out there and just fish. You never know what you can catch!
Where's Your Fish? 