Lake of the Woods trip 2013

So, mostly this blog has become for sermons and whatnot. That's nice but it's also somewhat a bad sign that I have had little time for other things. OK, so life is life and sometimes you do what you do to get by, but when an opportunity comes for something else it should not be ignored. Hence, Lake of the Woods trip 2013. If you're not interested in what I do on vacation that's just fine, but if you are here it is. Enjoy. Oh, and here's a warning: It's not exactly relaxing.

So, I have been up on the NW Angle three years straight for muskie fishing with my buddy, Carl. I'd been to the Angle before these trips but never for anything quite so crazy. This is not your grandpa's walleye trip. It's 12-14 hour days of sun and wind and sometimes waves and always fishing--lots of fishing.

Day 1: Steak

We arrived in the Angle late Sunday afternoon with the idea of getting on the water ASAP. Basically the philosophy of this entire trip is: Fish whenever fishing is possible. Sunday night fishing was possible; hence we fished. We didn't catch much (by that I mean we caught nothing) and it was only a mini little four hour tour. So, the order of the day was rainbows and steak--in that order, but not necessarily by preference.





Day 2: A muskie

Carl with the proof there are muskies in LotW

Now, nobody is going to claim muskie fishing is constant excitement--least of all me. But then again, I have grown up being a chess player; we sit and sit and think and think and at the end of the day maybe we win a game and maybe we don't. I can think of few better ways to prepare for muskie fishing... except perhaps doing some kind of forearm and hand workouts. After a day of sunny skies and seventeen re-applications of sunscreen my arms were just about ready to fall off. Muskie fishing is hard work. Some of the lures are harder to reel in than walleyes--and I'm not even remotely kidding. Thankfully, I spent most of the day tossing smaller things to entertain myself with pike and other lesser-sought-after fish, while always on the lookout for the sometimes-mythical muskellunge. This day we saw quite a few and I had one that I may very well have caught if I was paying a bit more attention, but we did end up with something to show for our efforts. One fish. And the funny thing is, that's not really a bad day.

Day 3: Where Frank catches muskie... and there is much rejoicing

Carl always catches muskies on Lake of the Woods. On our trip two years ago he boated something like six of them while his dad caught one and I went home empty-handed (but with a nice tan and some exciting pike--hey, fishing's usually fun even when you don't catch what you're after). So, the fact that Carl got a fish--in fact it may very well have been my fish, the very same one that I missed earlier or at least it was in the same spot--was not at all unexpected. I was ready to settle into the habit of Carl catching fish and me enjoying watching Carl catching fish, but wait! Before 8 a.m. on day three something unexpected happened: I got my muskie!

That's right, I made it a giant picture. Whatever.

As you can imagine, this boosted the confidence for a very solid day of fishing. This day included three more muskies, including our biggest of the trip--a 42.5" fish--that I seriously deserved an assist on. Yes, Carl caught it, but I was the first to see it and then, after it took off and seemed genuinely disinterested in eating, I just made out its shape in about two feet of incredibly murky water. Carl semi-got-it-to-bite, semi-snagged it with a jig that we'll never know if it was interested in, so yeah, Carl's fish; assist to Frank. The rest of the muskies for the day are below:

Day 4: The heatwave

Wednesday was gross. I actually had a fun day on the water (Monday was much longer for me), but there was no denying it was awfully hot. It hit something like 87 degrees and the wind that seemed to activate the fish the day before was very noticeably absent. We spent a lot of the day trying out some new spots and not finding fish; that really didn't help. Then when we got back on water we knew the fishing were slow and inactive. We saw plenty of muskies but it was 5 p.m. before I even put a little pike in the boat. That's a long, long day of fishing (10 hours) with zero fish. We ended up the day sans muskie, though Carl did manage to catch a smallmouth bass on a TopRaider, which is a lure that resembles a baby loon. This makes me very sad for baby loons because, honestly, if the smallmouth will eat them, what won't?

Day 5: The spot

I could really say any number of great things about this day. In spite of losing close to an hour re-spooling my reel after... cough, cough, completely screwing up my line in a backlash from hell, cough... we still managed to put ourselves on a lot of fish! Now, there might be some debate on what size constitutes a "real" muskie since some of these were mighty puny, but you can't argue with the numbers. This was a day of little guys. Seven fish, in fact, sub 30 inches.

But this was all before we hit "the spot." Every once in awhile you find a location and a time that just plain works and it just so happened to be a shallow weed bed with a small channel between two  islands. The fish were stacked in thick in our bay just outside the channel. Earlier in the day I had lost a decent fish in these weeds but when we came back around 5 p.m. it was apparently dinner time because we boated two bigger muskies, missed several more, and then I managed a gigantic northern pike--that had me fooled for a muskie from the moment it hit until Carl spotted it just by the boat.

 

We finished the day with a couple of nice fish for a total of ten (!) muskies. Most were small but there were enough nice ones to consider this a successful day by any count. Add to that it was a pleasant seventy degrees with clouds just thick enough to dull the sun and there were no complaints in our boat.

Day 6: The finale

We had only a few hours to fish on Friday morning and the dreaded cold front had moved in, lowering the pressure and supposedly turning off the fish bite. The early results backed this up. In our magical spot from the day before we saw only one, very timid, fish, and I began to believe that our luck had just dried up. But Carl had mentioned that he had heard bigger fish were biting on walk the dog lures--essentially slow moving surface lures that "walk" side to side across the water. I had only one such lure, The Pig, which has been the subject of much ridicule (mostly by me) since I first got it more than a decade ago. It was one of those things you see on TV and it's always catching big muskies but in real life? Not so much.

Until today.

OK, we didn't get any giant fish, but on the first bay I fished with the Pig I had one fish follow in to the boat and then one hit it spectacularly in open water, leaping more than a foot over the surface. I missed both fish but the omens were clear--this would be the Pig's day.

On our second bay (and running out of time) the Pig finally connected, and then--on the same bay--Carl added a second fish.
 



And that was it. I had another, bigger fish follow the Pig in our next bay, but soon enough we were packing up the gear and heading home. 17 muskies were caught over the course of the week, varying from some of the minis in the low 20" range to the 42.5" incher that Carl semi-snagged with many mid-upper 30" fish in-between. We had fun, caught fish, and spent a ton of time on the water. What more can a person ask for?

Relaxation? Well, maybe next vacation.