My brother Kenneth and I got out for the last couple hours today and had our lines in the water about 5:00 . I don't think I had been fishing five minutes when I hooked a nice fish. It didn't really fight too hard until it got about 10 feet below the ice. But then I got a good look at her and figured she was a good 29 or 30 inches. I also got a good look at my doctored up #5 Rapala just barely hooked in her lip. I took it as easy as I could trying to coax her head up into the hole, but she finally came off. So all you folks across the bay that heard some guy scream a few choice words about 5:15 or so, that was me!!! I then caught a couple dinks, then a just legal. I could not keep the dinks off, so I switched to a #9 Rap hoping to fix that problem. Wouldn't you know it, the smallest little walleye of the evening hit the #9. I'm not even sure if it was 8 inches. Since I was still catching dinks, I switched back to the same Rap I lost the big fish on earlier. Again, it wasn't down there 5 minutes and I had another good fish on. This one I landed and it turned out to be a nice 28 incher that I released. But from then on, it was dink after dink after dink. I quit counting at 13. I think I ended up with somewhere between 15-20 dinks before calling it a night. During this time Kenneth was also catching alot of dinks. But he did end up with two keepers. So we ended up with 3 keepers to bring home. It was a pretty fun couple of hours though...
I FINALLY managed to keep the hook in a decent one, for a change! Man, this year, if it wasn't for bad luck...
Anyway, I was south of Gladstone tonight, in about 30 FOW. Started marking good numbers of fish at about 6:45. A little before 7 everything started to happen at once! I had several fish on the screen, then the gas ran out on my heater, I missed several bites from fish screaming in on my bait, the radio died ( a crank up model,) and to top it off, I look out the window to see a flag up! I hated to leave the active fish on the graph, but I had an almost "sure thing" on the tip-up. Turned out to be a healthy 26 inch female. She hit a small sucker minnow one foot off of bottom. Problem with those small minnows is that the fish can suck them down quick, and she ended up being gut hooked. Oh well, at least she'll make a good batch of Poor Man's Lobster. Got back to the shack and there were still fish on the screen. Dropped the #9 Glow Tiger Rap back down and popped a 17 inch male in short order. A few minutes later, I landed a short fish on the same bait. Amazing how a 10 minute flurry of activity will make up for a couple hours of "dead time."