Well, Dianne and I are back from Big Winnie. Man did we have a good time, weather was perfect except for the last day. We were forced off the water x's 2 by lightning not much fun.
We stayed at Williams Narrows Resort on Cutfoot Sioux, what a beautiful place and the hospitality of Joyce, Jerry, Joe, Bev, etal was marvelous. The resort is 372 miles from our house. The only bummer of the trip was the price of gas, the highest we found was $3.29/gal at Deer River, MN and the cheapest was $2.69 in Sauk Center on the way back.
Now to the fishing. The fishing was wonderful, the catching was so-so. Everyone was commenting on how slow the fishing was. I caught some nice fish one 24 inch and one 23 inch, of course those have to be released as the slot is to release everything between 17 and 26, that makes it rough, but it is supposed to be good for the fishery. We did have one meal of fish as planned and brought nine home, 7 walleye and 2 northern. I just couldn't get much going on live bait, you had to work real subtle breaks and with the wind I just had trouble controlling the big Ranger on those breaks, the backtrollers had more success. We did catch some fish drifting with a crawler and Phelps Floater, in fact the 23 came on that. Our best pattern was trolling #5 White Shad Raps in 8-12 feet of water along the north shore right west of the Gap. We lost 3 big fish and some smaller ones, they just weren't hammering the bait. Dianne kicked my you know what she caught most of the fish trolling. It was one of those deals same bait, same amount of line out etc and one rod outproduces the other.
As I mentioned earlier the weather was great except for that last day. We were on the water by 7:30 AM and the first storm came through about nine. We hightailed it back to the cabin and went out about an hour and a half later. We made one pull through our area and heard thunder, we were going to make one more pull, but thought better of it and left. I am sure glad we had the speed of the Ranger and 200HP Mercury Optimax available, because we wouldn't have made it back with out the speed. We stayed in after that, it rained over an inch in an hour, I had a wet boat when we got back to Spirit Lake.
This was my first outing with my new Lowrance LCX 25C and Navionics Hotmaps Premium North mapping chip. Man what a unit, the difference the color makes is significant. I recorded a couple of trolling runs on a chip, and that is really cool, you can see the sonar log as well as your path on the map, so you can get a better feel for the structure. I took the chip out brought it in the house and played it on the Lowrance Sonar Viewer in MapCreate 6. Really nice! I really like the capabilities of the unit, but of course I am a technology freak. I am going to get Doc Samson's second video, and learn more.
I am now preparing for the 25th Annual Release Tournament of Upper Great Plains Chapter of Muskies Inc. , I haven't been muskie fishing for over a month, so I have no clue as to what is going on out there. I am going to prefish tomorrow and Thursday. Later
