From the Archives – I have 100s of posts that were made on fishing forums starting around 1998. When I have nothing new to say, I thought I would start putting them up on my blog. I hope you like them.
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2/22 and 29/04 Fox River WWD and Exploring / Part 1
Air temperature 38 to 50 degrees, water temperature 36 to 40 degrees in the river and 56 in the discharge, clear to partly cloudy skies, water normal, visibility about 3 feet in the river and unlimited in the discharge, split shot with hook and small plastics and jig/twisters.
Too much work, then none. Crappy weather than fine. It all came together for a couple of days a week apart and I was able to get out for a while each time. Total:
1 smallmouth bass,
1 channel catfish,
1 sucker,
1 walleye,
3 carp.
What a difference a week can make. Not in the fishing, that stayed slow and you were forced to work for every fish caught. But the river, the skies and the land were all coming alive with this false spring. It’s rare to get weather like this in February and it seems everyone and everything was fooled into coming out and checking out if this was a permanent situation. Long range forecasts say no, but that doesn’t mean you can’t cram as much outdoor activity into one day as possible.
It’s also rare that my work load, which runs seven days a week right now, lightens up enough that I can spend an afternoon on the water. It’s even rarer if I have a whole weekend off. But all these things came together at once and there were times I felt like a hamster on a wheel trying to run around to all the different things I wanted to do.
I met up with Jamie and Gary on both of these outings and Rich came out on the 29th to torture his shoulder muscles casting giant plugs for muskie. On the 22nd, there was still a fair amount of ice covering the river where there is little current. I’m always surprised at how long it takes to make ice and snow go away. Maybe for me its just that I hate both so much that if its around for more than a week, it starts to adversely effect my state of mind. In other words, it depresses the hell out of me.
The benefit of this time of year is that the sun is a little higher in the sky, which results in warmer temperatures and even on days like this when it’s only about 38 degrees, it just feels warmer. I got to the river later than Jamie and Gary and decided to fish a stretch that was difficult, or just down right dangerous and stupid to fish when the river was covered in ice. I knew how deep the holes were and something about dropping off ice into 3 feet of water wasn’t all that appealing. Today I was able to walk on the rocks in the riffles and pretty much avoid walking on the ice altogether.
I did have to break through some thin ice in about a foot of water to get across the river. As I snapped off the last of the connecting layer, the gap got wider, and wider. I looked down stream to see a slab of ice about 100 feet long and 30 feet wide start to drift away. Very cool to watch. Then I realized Gary and Jamie were down stream right where this thing was heading. I reached for the phone in my coat pocket and came up with nothing, it was in the car. I watched the slab of ice slowly pick up speed as it edged out into the faster current. Poor Gary and Jamie, if it didn’t kill them, was I going to hear about this one.
Cold water fishing can be torturous. The presentation has to be even slower than what I’m accustomed to doing. Getting lures in just the right spot is difficult on a good day. In cold water, inches count. Fish won’t chase things very far with this water temperature. A short stretch of river that had the right combination of current, still water and depth produced nothing. Every few casts my line would slowly head off in one direction or another, the sign of fishing line and lure being dragged over a carp or sucker. Otherwise, their were no takers.
When I got up to Gary and Jamie, Gary mentioned a huge chunk of ice that slid past. I remember saying something like “Yeah, you really gotta keep an eye out for ice floes.” Or something like that. I figured that since they were still alive, no point telling them the details.
Gary had a mixed bag of fish much like mine and Jamie was picking off some smaller smallmouth bass and green sunfish. Even the little fish were being a little picky and none of the action was hot and heavy. Jamie was obviously tired and eventually gave up a little early. Gary and I wandered down stream and got hit by some fairly big feeling fish, but landing them seemed to be out of the question. We wandered back upstream marveling at the fact that all of the minnows were gone. It had been at least December since Gary or I had seen the usual schools of minnows that are normally in this area. It’s no exaggeration to chase hundreds of minnows upstream through the shallow water. Now their were none. Gary lasted a little longer, but eventually headed home to his lovely wife.
There was one other angler sticking it out, but he was fishing from shore, which limited him to one area. We talked back and forth as we fished. About work, fishing, where we fish and more fishing. It was getting near sunset and I noticed a racket coming from the sky. The unmistakable incessant honking of geese. Every few minutes a flock of geese could be heard approaching. By the time they were overhead the honking was overwhelming. Hundreds at a time were going over. The lines of the “V’s” they create stretched out by 30 or more geese on each side. Well over a thousand went by in those last couple of hours I was on the water. The opening water was already bringing the geese back north. Between the layers of geese were ducks with their more erratic back and forth search for some place to spend the night.
The sun was gone and so was the angler on the shore. The geese continued to fly overhead only now they were more heard than seen, but the racket told me that they were still there in huge flocks. I sat on the shore as I fished since I was in no hurry to go anywhere. Last year at this time there were schools of shad and minnows all over. So far this winter the minnows had disappeared and I had yet to see any of the shad. But as I sat there fishing, the shallower water came alive with silvery sparkles of bait fish popping all over the surface. I saw this a year ago when the shad were in so I assumed that’s what they were. Still another sign that things were going to pick up dramatically in the next few weeks.
