Summer Returns
October 24, 2020
James, Randall & Jack were with me this morning, on this beautiful summer like day! What was supposed to blow up big time, never even got started! The waters were a sheet of glass the entire time we were out. Great job on the weather reports guys!
We were scheduled to fish another body of water last night, but changed our minds this morning, due to the winds arriving much later. Afternoon was going to be bad but at least we would have this morning to fish for sturgeon. Randal really wanted to do battle with something big and would take any opportunity to fish for them.
We ran to the area in a light NE wind that had a 1 to 2 foot roll on the water, due to it blowing against the current. This would lessen the amount of power required to hold with the electric motor too! After cruising around, I finally settled on a decent looking area to fish. Now we would have to wait!
We had made a move due to no bites and were about to make another when I locked up on something small. As it turned out, it was a red horse sucker and not what we were looking for. The move was made and soon after setting the lines again, Randall reeled in a small sturgeon. Right species, wrong size! A few more also made their way to the boat through the morning but it was after noon when we finally received a decent bite. James was tight to a good one, but not the true giant that I had hoped for. After about 5 minutes or so, he had it in the net and a few pics were shot before the release.
Several other sturgeon were caught of decent size, but we weren’t really able to hook into anything huge today. There was one big catfish that Jack caught that made for interesting pics though!
Sometime after 1:30 they decided to switch it up and wanted to fish for something else. James had been hoping to catch bass and I rigged up the rods to try for the smallies. I started on a few bumps that soon had me moving even shallower due to the results. It was here that they managed to get into a few fish with Randall catching a jumbo perch and also nailing a pretty good pike. The bass were reluctant to eat for James as he saw only followers. We did see a few big sturgeon cruising the area that may have been why!
Time was getting on and with less than an hour remaining I decided to try for walleye instead. We moved offshore and without any wind at all, I was forced to use the electric motor in order to make the drifts. Three lines in should have been productive but nobody even had a bite! I was marking plenty of walleye on the bottom but none of them seemed to want to eat with the lack of wind. Six passes later, we were done!
It was a pleasure to fish the sturgeon in almost flat calm conditions, but I would have preferred the big winds for the walleye that were forecasted. The temps were also nice today as it felt more like late summer than mid fall. They did manage three full rotations while anchored up and in the end, James’s sturgeon proved to be the largest of the day. Jack’s catfish got the exotic species award! The bass & walleye fishing could have been better, but we really didn’t spend much time trying for them. In the end, focussing on the sturgeon proved to be the right move and maybe we should have remained on them throughout the entire day. We did leave when they were biting and that’s never a good move! Hopefully tomorrow will be an even better day!
