Zanders Anyone

May 15th 2018

Christopher & Dave were with me this morning, for a half day of fishing. Fortunately, it wasn’t too cold overnight and the water temps hadn’t fallen too bad. Unfortunately the skies didn’t look too nice and I was glad I had brought extra rain gear for them to wear. Not as glad as they were though as they were wearing shorts!

We began on a spot far from the launch and along the way, the rain started to fall. It got even heavier when we arrived, but it didn’t seem to matter. They were fishing and didn’t care! I decided to troll this area to see if I could find a few walleye for them to catch, but it looked almost void of fish. Christopher did however lose a few before we finally had one come aboard. They were fishing with rod in hand and I had set another in the holder to make three. This one went off and Christopher soon landed his first ever walleye! He immediately noticed how much it looked like a Zander, their European cousin. Being from Scotland, neither of them had ever caught one and were happy to have finally done so. We kept at the troll for a little longer but never landed another fish from here. With the waves building from the wind and the direction having changed, I decided to pull the plug. Off to another area and hopefully better fishing!

After a long run, I settled on shallower water and they began to troll. We used the same technique with the third rod in the holder and it didn’t take long. Chris was tight to another walleye and it joined the first one in the well. Dave was having a tough time keeping the fish pinned after losing a couple in the first spot but I knew it would soon change. Chris on the other hand was hooked up several more times before Dave finally got in the game. Now they were both catching fish and it was a mix of giant perch, walleye and the odd smallie. Although not fast and furious, there was enough action to keep them interested. I had to really cover water and hit every waypoint and icon I had in order to get bit. The 51 degree water temps and overcast skies with rain weren’t helping. The fish just didn’t seem to want to move! Stained water didn’t help either as visibility was almost zero! Unless you hit them on the head, they didn’t eat. In fact most of the ones that made it to the net, fell off once landed. All of this aside, they managed to get into a good number of fish in their short time on the water. Dave rebounded nicely and landed several good ones as well and in the end, they were tied. There was a friendly competition going on that Dave almost won. Unfortunately he dropped the last fish while reeling it in causing the results to end even.

We had fished for over 4 hours and by noon, called the day. They were heading to another area for several days to fish for carp and needed to get on the road. This was just the prelude to the actual reason why they had flown so far to fish. I’m sure that if the weather warms up some, they will be having a great time as well, landing all kinds of big fish. The same thing should occur here if we ever get stability and water temps. In the mean time, I’ll just have to keep grinding it out and covering water in search of fish. Better fishing, still to come!!