Fishing with Doyle, Jacob, and Brock 8/20/17

They wanted to go either walleye or perch fishing, whichever was going to do better.  Doyle had some info on some walleye to the west, and since the wind forecast was for light winds today, we decided to hit up Rickard's for minnows and launch out of Catawba, to make that run over there.

I figured if the walleye weren't going, we could perch fish instead...thus the stop for minnows.  

Well, I called my friend Nate, who let me know about a walleye bite that was pretty far away from Catawba, so I asked my crew if they were up for a boat ride, and they said yes.

Doyle is the fella buying my boat at the end of the month, so it was fun to get him out in it. I asked him if he wanted to drive it out to the spot, but he didn't want to..."Not yet", he said. He would drive it later in the day.  I guess maybe he thought I would yell at him or something...hehehe   Anyway....we made the long run west and put some Bandits out behind the Off Shore boards.

Nate was out there too, and we kept each other informed about what was working as we caught fish.  Between us, we narrowed it down to a weighted program. I'm not exactly sure how he was running his, but I think maybe he was running his behind 2oz inline weights, because he was running his lines off the "big boards", where as I was running mine with 2oz snap weights 25-30 feet in front of the lure behind inline boards.  The total distance back behind the planer board was 70-80 back.  Speed was 2.2-2.4mph and we were fishing in 27-28 feet of water. There was a lot of floating algae bloom throughout the water column over there.

We lost a few fish, and a couple lures, due to over zealous reeling on the part of "Bass Guy" syndrome...lol  That's what I call it when a person reels too fast, instead of "nice and steady", and that fish is water skiing on the surface to the boat. If you're ever wondering....no...you shouldn't try to ski and lift a 3-4 pound walleye in the boat, with no net, while it's thrashing about....deep sigh.

But, on the bright side, we did manage to put 5-6 walleye in the box, before we decided to go give perching a try someplace.

The wind was stronger in the morning than they had been calling for, and the nice calm lake was 1-3 where we were. It did calm down by 10am when we went searching for perch, so at least we could run a little faster then earlier in the morning.

By now, Doyle was learning the ropes with all the equipment. He was getting familiar with the Humminbird unit and how to read what it was telling him, the Minn-Kota Ulterra, and its touch screen remote, the "baby ETEC" kicker, and the most fun one...the Evinrude 300 G2.  I had him move us from spot to spot to try and find some perch. We only managed two small sheepshead and a few lost minnows, before Doyle called it a day and we headed back in.

After we got back to my house, I asked if Jacob and Brock wanted to take the extra minnows over to my neighbor's pond to feed the fish, and so they did. I'm sure the fish were very happy. And, that made me happy. :)

Doyle is happy also, and can't wait to pick the Ranger up in October. That will be sad day for me, because it's been my favorite one so far. He picked GREAT colors on this one. ;)

Tomorrow I am fishing with Ray Willig and his buddies, and we're going to try for some perch again. They are staying at Little Ted's Cottage's, so we'll launch out of Mazurik's even though there are spots to the west I want to try, that I marked fish at on the way in today.  It's never a long ride in a Ranger...wink wink.

Don't burn your eyeballs tomorrow...:)

Stay tuned....

Capt Juls