Monday, August 1, 2011

Smallmouth, walleye, and more!

a nice tailwater smallie!
Last weekend my family made the trip up to northern wisconsin to our cabin.  It's up near Boulder junction and surrounded by great fishing.   We arrived late friday night and planned on fishing on saturday and maybe a bit on sunday.  Well when we woke up the next morning it was a complete downpour... so much for the 10% chance of rain...  After the rain stopped we ended up getting out for about an hour before we had to go out for dinner with some friends.   I was throwing a mepps spinner and ended up catching 2 walleye, and a nice northern.   I was fishing below a dam and the water was very clear and i could actually see some nice smallies and i even saw two nice musky's.   Of course i would cast to the musky, but no bite.  The second musky came up into the shallow water where there was  pretty strong current, but only about 2 feet deep.   At that time i was using the 8ft 4wt that i built for my mom with a small, maybe 1 inch long, crayfish fly that i drift for trout.  I figured i might catch a nice smallie.  So of course i casted to the musky, that was about 40inches,  and i drifted the crayfish right past him, recast, drift, recast then i noticed my line stopped.  I assumed that the splitshot had just got caught in the rocks, but when i picked up the line, the musky started to shake his head with his mouth wide open.  I was shocked that i had just hooked a 40 inch musky on a 1inch crayfish.  I got really luck when the musky decided to run up river and away from the logs that were just downstream.  I fought the beast as best i could with a light 4wt and 4x tippet.  After about two minutes he took a run downstream into the stump field. He avoided the stumps but ended up biting thru the line.   Fun fight, but i do wish i would have landed him!

The next day we ended up on the water at about 1pm, and within two hours we had caught our limit of walleye, and had two release 4 more.   We also caught about 20 smallies and 5 northern.  Great weekend of fishing!

first and largest northern

one of 5 northern caught while tossing a bucktail for musky

was hoping this nice smallie was a musky when it hit my bucktail

another shot of that hungry smallie

the old man gets a nice one!

sitting in the shallow water

another nice sized smallie

a decent northern

I caught this northern on the cast after the one above... they sure were hungry!

thats a limit! 3 fish each, only 1 of which can be over 14.

5 comments:

  1. awesome fishing, cant wait to hear about the rest of your catches. its always the one that got away that keeps us coming back for more. the vision of that musky strike im sure is burned in your brain...

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  2. it will be, and i will catch a musky on a fly rod someday! (probably not the 4wt...)

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  3. Those are some beautiful fish and great looking water to boot. Sorry to hear about that sweet Muskie that got away. Good thing you have a cabin up there and will be able to head back for some revenge. Great Post. Tight Lines.

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  4. Great post and pics Blake. Too bad about the musky, but from your description of the area there'll be others. I'm still waiting for my first on the fly.

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  5. so far im 0/3 the two others we while bass fishing with poppers. hopefully i'll be 1/4 pretty soon!

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