Reports

Had a late booking from Charlie and his grandson Rowan on Sunday for Veteran’s Day.  I last guiding Charlie and Rowan back early in 2020 when Rowan was around 10 or 11 years old.  He’s turning 15 in a week or so.  It’s amazing how time flies and how fast kids grow up.

Wind forecasts were all over the map for today.  Most looked reasonable, but I did see weather.gov forecasting southerly winds 10 to 20 mph with gusts up to 30.  The other (generally more accurate) sites like windy.com were calling for much more reasonable winds gusting into the teens.  As we got underway, around 9 am, we had next to NO WIND on the lake!  This lack of wind really slowed down our morning fishing.  After an hour of casting bladebaits, jerkbaits and jigs, we had one chunky rock bass to show, thanks to Charlie.  I was marking fish – they just weren’t very active, at least for what we were giving them.

As the morning progressed, the bass got active and Rowan had the hot hand with a jerkbait.  He caught a bunch of nice fish in short order running 11.5″ to 14″ or so.  Charlie nabbed the first shallow laker I have seen this season.  Some good perch also came on board.  In another area, Rowan caught a nice 16″ smallmouth.  No walleyes or signs of rainbows.  Charlie has a long history of fishing this lake and other water bodies in the area.  All in all, it wound up being a decent fishing day.  We had fun watching, at times, multiple smallmouths coming in for the jerkbaits.  Shore anglers are catching occasional rainbows but action is slow.  Water temperatures remain around 55 degrees – still a good 5 to 10 degrees warmer than average.

Plenty of openings remain for late fall fishing, including this coming weekend, November 16th and 17th, along with the 18th, 20th – 22nd, and 24th through 30th.  Most dates are open in December and onwards as well.