<\/a>I remember\u00a0a fine Sunday afternoon\u00a0about ten years ago when I was battling big boat wakes on a popular metro muskie lake.\u00a0 At that point in my life, I really did a lot of muskie fishing and I as slowed to bounce through still another ski boat\u2019s wake, I strongly evaluated my choice of water craft.\u00a0 Maybe it was time to move up to boat better suited to big or busy water.\u00a0 It was a week or two later that I found myself on a remote section of a river in northern Wisconsin, searching for muskies and sturgeon.\u00a0 Once, while we were anchored up I had a good chance to take a good look around.\u00a0 No boat wakes here.\u00a0 No Boom Boom music coming from wakeboard boats.\u00a0 Just birds and squirrels and flowing water.\u00a0 And lots of fish.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0I knew right then that I would always have a suitable river boat.<\/p>\n

I have since added to my fleet and I do have a bigger boat in addition to my jon boat.\u00a0 These days the big boat gets the most time on the water.\u00a0 And the fact that for three summers in a row we have come into smallmouth season with crazy high water on the Mississippi hasn\u2019t helped.\u00a0 It brought me great pleasure to roll the Green Monster out of the garage the other day, but at the same time saddened me at how much dust had settled on the rods that live in there\u00a0and the motor since it was parked last fall.\u00a0 I moved the boat out into the yard, hooked the hose up to the lower unit on\u00a0 the trusty 30 Yamaha, and hoped for similar results to every other time I went to start this motor.\u00a0 I was not disappointed as it fired on the third pull.\u00a0 I let it run for a few minutes while I rigged rods for the next day\u2019s fun and games.<\/p>\n

I have guide trips starting this week, and while I have fished on the Mississippi enough to know where the fish are likely to be depending upon the season and water flow, it is always nice to get a feel for the river.\u00a0 With all of the family outings and tournaments this year, I hadn\u2019t had much \u201cfun fishing\u201d this year.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t until I was about halfway to the access that it sunk in that within 30 minutes I would be on one of my favorite bodies of water to fish.\u00a0 Big Grin!<\/p>\n

The River was still flowing high, but was at a manageable level, and soon I was buzzing upstream.\u00a0 I decided to start on a favorite bank that is favorable in high water\u2014the current is a bit lighter here, but there is lots of nice cover for the brown bass to wait in ambush.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m considered weird by many for a variety of reasons.\u00a0 One of which is that while I\u2019m known for being an avid fly rod angler, and there is no way I would rather catch smallies [or most other fish for that matter], I will be the first one to grab a spinning or casting rod when conditions aren\u2019t just right for flycasting.\u00a0 The world of fishing is divided pretty strongly on this\u2014either you fly fish, or you don\u2019t.\u00a0 It turns out that I also really like pitching a jig and craw around fallen trees, I also like twitching soft plastic jerkbaits in more open water.\u00a0 I\u2019ll even cast spinnerbaits and crankbaits [sidebar–there is no better way to catch river smallies than on crankbaits] but fishing \u201cchunk and reel\u201d baits like these does get a little boring.\u00a0 I believe that my rod count on Sunday had 6 baitcasting rods, two fly rods, and one spinning rod with.\u00a0 I know that I used them all for at least a few casts.\u00a0 Remember\u2014flycasting is my favorite, and I\u2019m pretty good with the long rod.\u00a0 But when I\u2019m out alone, controlling the boat in the wind and current, well sometimes flycasting stops being fun.<\/p>\n

Pitching a jig and craw to fallen trees, in stream rocks and current seams requires a different skill set than other types of fishing, it takes some elements of largemouth bass fishing [pitching jigs to cover with accuracy] and combines them with drift fishing for steelhead [keeping track of your lure in the current, detecting bites].\u00a0 You also must deliver a rock and roll hookset, which I also enjoy.\u00a0 It can be fun to come up with a shout-out for every time you set the hook\u2026 like \u201cBOOYAH!\u201d or \u201cSHOW ME THE MONEY\u201d or maybe a Serena Williams style grunt.<\/p>\n

Anyway, even though I got to the river at the crack of 11, the fishing was still pretty decent, probably landed about ten, mostly on jig\/craw, a couple on flies, couple on a soft plastic jerkbait, and the rest on a crankbait.\u00a0 I left plenty for my customers later this week.<\/p>\n

I compiled some video clips into a short \u201cbest of\u201d movie, check it out here\u00a0https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=bwbRbltK2b4<\/a><\/p>\n

The big fish of the day got away, and for unknown technical reasons the ones I caught on a fly rod didn\u2019t get saved to video, but it still turned out pretty good.\u00a0 As the water gets a little lower, the fly action will just get better and better.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I remember\u00a0a fine Sunday afternoon\u00a0about ten years ago when I was battling big boat wakes on a popular metro muskie lake.\u00a0 At that point in my life, I really did a lot of muskie fishing and I as slowed to bounce through still another ski boat\u2019s wake, I strongly evaluated my choice of water craft.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[21,25,18],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=487"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":497,"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions\/497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}