Fish-Filled Sturgeon Bay Weekend

I got behind on blogs this weekend. At the ends of long days on the water and late nights around dinner tables, the call for sleep won the battle for my time.

It sure wasn't a matter of nothing to tell. The weekend included a stupidly good day of smallmouth fishing, my first ever king salmon, a morning and an afternoon of doing types of fishing I'd never done before, plentiful great photo opportunities and the chance to give a seriously good test to Shakespeare's new Ugly Stik Elite rods.

It also included a pretty good sample of Wisconsin's famous fried cheese curds, some incredible smoked string cheese and a few really good steaks, but I suppose that's straying from fishing.

Today I'm traveling home. In fact, I'm riding to the Green Bay airport right now. I'll try to do some writing along the way because I only get two days at home before I repack a bag with lighter clothes and bigger lures and point the truck toward the airport once again. This time Mexico bound. Word has it there is wifi at the lodge now, so hopefully I'll do better keeping up with blogs!

North & South

Sturgeon Bay in Door County, Wisconsin

A Delta notification on my phone tells me that I can check in for my flight any time. I guess that means the next trip is getting close. I'll actually drive to Atlanta early tomorrow morning to get on a plane and will do the same thing next week at about the same time. Both are fishing trips that promise great action, the chance to field test some cool gear, and many opportunities to gather photos and story material, but that's where the similarities end.

Tomorrow's travels point me north. I'm flying to Minneapolis and then connecting to Green Bay, where I'll spend three days fishing the spectacular bays that bound Door County, which is located on the peninsula between the Green Bay and Lake Michigan. We'll fish cool, clear, rocky water and target smallmouth bass, walleyes and salmon, and I suspect it will be sweatshirt weather.

Next week's air travel take me south -- way south -- with the first flight going to Dallas and the connecting flight taking me to Mazatlan, Mexico. From Mazatlan, we'll travel by van to Lake El Salto, where big largemouth bass will be the lone target. We'll work timber and vegetation with big lures, and light fishing clothes will be the order of the day. I'll go with sleeves and long pants, but only for the sake of sun protection.

Today's work is a mixed bag of wrapping up writing projects, packing, banking, charging batteries, clearing memory cards and doing the other stuff that will make me ready for travel. Hopefully I'll get to bed at a good time, because the 2:30 a.m. alarm is going to seem pretty early!

A Few Days Early

Dan Elsner of Get Bit Baits shows the sort
of fish the waters around Sturgeon Bay normally
produce by the dozens early in the season.

The spring wake-up showed signs of getting going yesterday in Little Sturgeon Bay, and word we heard suggested that it was happening throughout the area. No crazy catch numbers, but fish caught and spotted in normal early areas. Plentiful sun on Sunday and yesterday clearly has fish moving up into the bays and within a couple of days the fishing should be absolutely off the hook. Unfortunately, I won't get to see it because I fly out of town today.

Virtually every spring, the best Sturgeon Bay fishing of the entire year occurs on the first few days after Wisconsin's bass season opens. This year was the exception. The ice only broke up a few days before the season, and the water just wasn't warm enough, soon enough, for the fish to start moving up into the bays. In fact, the ice still isn't completely gone. There are still a couple of  huge sheets of ice out floating in the main bay, and we could see one of them near the horizon from Little Surgeon Bay while we fished yesterday.

Fishing was tough, and I know that was hard for Dan Elsner of Get Bit Baits, who was eager to show off the spectacular smallmouth fishery just outside of his back yard. I still enjoyed learning about the area and getting out there, and I'm confident that we did all the right stuff to try to find the fish. It was just a weird opener, and we were a few days early.

I don't fly home today. Instead, I fly to Buffalo for another round of Great Lakes fishing. The ice lingered for a long time in Lake Erie, too, so it will be interesting to see what I find at that end. I suspect if Erie is way behind as well we might focus most efforts on trout and salmon in the lower Niagara River. I'll get plenty of reports after I get to town tonight, I'm sure.

Delight & Dread

Little in fishing blends delight and dread quite like a jumbo smallmouth going fully areal. I experienced that in a big way today. As soon as I set the hook, this fish came straight up, and as she flopped in mid-air, well out of the water, we actually thought her to be even bigger than she was. And of course she wasn't done. Despite my best efforts to hold her low with the rod, she jumped two more times (although neither of the others was a high as the first).

Dread, of course, was magnified by the fact that big fish haven't come easy this week. My fish was one of four smallmouths that came in the boat, and that was better than most people have been experiencing for the past couple of days. Normally, you wouldn't think twice about losing a smallie -- even a big one -- in this area during opening weekend because it would be one of dozens. However, this year's Wisconsin bass opener has been tough on virtually everyone in the Sturgeon Bay area and even south through the lower Green Bay area, where we were today. Winter was so cold that everything is behind and most fish seemingly just haven't moved up into the bays yet. One day soon it will be amazing. Hopefully tomorrow we'll see a good hint of that. We're fishing Little Sturgeon Bay.

My big jumping fish hit a Get Bit Baits Crawling Tube, fished on a 1/8 ounce head inside-style tube head.

Round 1 to the Fish

Well, the fish won today. With everything way behind (here, like most places) and most water in Sturgeon Bay hovering close to 40 degree, the fish simply hadn't moved up even to the places where they normally show up first and typically are already using when Wisconsin's bass season opens.

Although the fish didn't cooperate, I had a great time running about the bay and learning about it and am very appreciative of Chris Johnson and Doug McDonald, who hit it hard, covering a lot of water, trying a lot of stuff and teaching me a bunch. Both grew up in Door County, and they have been friends since sixth grade and tournament partners for nearly 25 years. For me it was a fun day of learning about a beautiful area and about the bass fishery that Bassmaster just named No. 1 in the nation. And despite the fish not showing themselves today, I know the fishery truly is world-class.

Tomorrow our smallmouth quest goes a few miles south to the Fox River, which feeds the Bay of Green Bay close to the city of Green Bay. I'll keep you posted when I can!

New Year Fishes

And so we begin anew. New friends, new places, new fishing adventures and almost certainly a nice dose of time enjoyed with old friends on favored waters and around familiar fish camps.

So where will this year's fishing adventures take me? Many, many unknowns there. I don't even know where I'll spend my first fishing days of the new year. The soonest solid plan puts me on ice in Pennsylvania in a week and a half (as much as an ice plan is every solid), but I may travel to South Carolina between now and then, and it's certainly not impossible that I steal a day or part of a day to visit a pond or a trout stream close to home.

Looking at my calendar, at appears 2014 might include quite a bit of fishing in the North. Confirmed travel plans, as of now, have me fishing in seven different states, and those seven include Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and New York.

The seven states with the set plans don't include Georgia, but I'm fairly confident I'll spend at least one day fishing around home some time in the next 52 weeks. I suppose the same could be said about both Carolinas.

Fishing dreams and a trip I hope to make include a big western swing, possibly in September. The Walnut Valley Festival takes Nathaniel and me to Kansas most Septembers, so assuming we make that trip this year, I may work around the notion that we'd already be more than halfway to the Rockies and make some trout fishing plans. That would mean a lot of driving and gas and a pretty long block away from home, but I sure could use the material we could gather on such a trip, and I've never spent time stream fishing in the American West.

The trout trip, like most 2014 fishing plans, remains a big maybe. Whatever waters I get to discover, species I get to target and folks I get to meet, I'm looking forward to it, and I'm grateful for each opportunity ahead.

Door County Smallmouth Video

A little slice of the fun on my Wisconsin trip last month. I got edged out by a couple of ounces in the Kalin's one-grub tourney at day's end!