Team Building Outing

A larger group of 7 saw me requesting the help of Don, once again. He had helped me out a week ago when I had a group of 12 and was back for more. We split the group and I took the majority of them which included; Julie, Hardy, Sven & Joe. As usual, we were faced with big winds at the start and any chance at sturgeon fishing wasn’t going to happen. To make matters worse, it was also raining and not too pleasant. They had requested an afternoon instead of the perfect morning and we had to deal with what we were faced with. I decided to drop shot open water and drift with these winds. First to hook up was Sven and he landed a high end keeper walleye that went directly into the livewell after a few pics. Julie was getting into the perch and the others were struggling to hook into anything. Eventually all of them hooked fish with Hardy landing keeper walleye and Joe dropped something before I could see it to net. Sven also hooked into a really nice smallie and realized quickly that they are much stronger than the eyes! Sometime after a couple of hours, the rain let up & and the winds diminished. We made a few more drifts and I thought that the sturgeon fishing could be possible. I quickly packed up and headed to fish the deep water looking for a real beast. It’s always a slow, painful task but the rewards are definitely worth the wait. Unfortunately today it wasn’t! We held in there for over an hour with only goby bites and used up plenty of worms trying. As they were wanting more walleye action, we decided to head back and hopefully get into some fish. I think Joe was the only one that hadn’t landed any fish earlier but he changed that with a nice over. Pics were all he got from this fish as it was immediately returned back to the lake. Along with his walleye he also managed to land a jumbo perch and missed several other bites. In fact they all missed fish for some reason! We held in here until 5:00 when we decided to call the day. Everyone had caught fish and had a great time in the boat learning new tricks and techniques. Julie had started an armature caster and was now able to pitch the drop shot rig perfectly in between other fishermen. Well, most of the time anyways! The Team Building group had spent a great afternoon doing something different and found out that they all thoroughly enjoyed fishing. Don’s group had similar success on the smallies and all 7 of them were talking about doing a return trip either together or with others. Hopefully this will happen and I’ll see them again as it was a fun, relaxing day on the water without any pressure. Even Mother Nature took a break after she dropped a bunch of moisture upon us, with the usual winds! Let’s see what tomorrow brings!