On the River With Hayden and Luke

This past Sunday Hayden actually asked me to take her for a boat ride out on the river.  I immediately liked the idea.  I asked Luke if he would want to come along and then gave my mom a call to see if the kids could stay with her overnight while I stayed out and fished for cats.  She said yes without hesitation.  We got a few things together, picked up a new life vest for Hayden, hooked up the boat, and headed north.

If I've learned anything about taking kids fishing, it's that keeping their time on the water limited and then filling that time with food and drinks is pretty vital to having a good trip.  I packed sandwiches, threw in some Gatorade, and let them each pick a snack.  I also arranged for my parents to pick the kids up after about an hour.  It all worked out perfectly.  Hayden took a little while to get her sea legs and I made her very nervous as I moved all over the boat and rocked it a little bit.  She eventually settled in, but she felt more secure sitting on the floor and stayed there for the duration.  Luke just wanted to drive the boat.  I let him steer us a couple hundred yards away from the launch and then we anchored to catch some bait and eat our sack dinner.  We caught one sucker.  Luke was already to thump it on the head and cut it up on the spot.  Hayden wanted nothing to do with that.  She said that she felt sorry for the fish and didn't think it was nice for me to kill it for bait.  I slipped it into the livewell and changed the subject.  When the kids were done eating, I took them for a little ride around the river.  Hayden liked going under the bridge.  Luke enjoyed sitting in my lap and steering.  The hour went pretty quickly and my parents showed up just as it started to sprinkle.  Good timing.

After I dropped the kids off, I went under the bridge to cut up my bait.  I checked the water temperature and was surprised that it had come up several degrees.  The temperature sensor read 62 degrees.  I thought that this would likely translate into fish.  I spent the first hour of my night at the snag across from the gun club.  All I got up there was a turtle gnawing on a piece of my cutbait.  At close to 10:00 I got a call from my dad saying that the kids were having a hard time settling in.  I talked to both of them.  Hayden sounded tired and exasperated with Luke.  Luke sounded a little homesick.  He said he wished that the room in Grandpa's house looked like his room.  I did my best to settle them both and it sounds like they were then able to calm down.  Either that or my parents were very patient with them and decided to let me fish.  I barely got a tap on the cutbait for the rest of the night.  Fortunately I decided to try some dipbait.  I threw out some Sonny's and pretty quickly got a nice tug.  I messed up the hookset and reeled in nothing but an empty dip worm.  After re-loading, I was able to stick a scrappy little fish.  I followed it up with one that was a little bigger.  By then it was close to midnight and I decided that I'd better head home so that I wouldn't have too rough of a start to my week.  I left thinking that I probably could have caught a lot more fish if I would have fished the Sonny's as my primary bait. 

It's hard to imagine that these fish were down there scavenging through the flats and passing up on those big, fatty pieces of sucker.  It doesn't make logical sense, but sometimes you have to forget logic and just try stuff.  I'll keep in mind that Sonny's is a great option on those nights when the fish are snubbing the cutbait. 

I loved having Hayden and Luke out there and especially that it seemed like a really good experience for them.  Once Hayden knew that we were going, she told all the neighbors.  She even made up little songs about going fishing.  It's a beautiful thing to see my kids get excited about being on the water.  I feel like they both had a great time and I think that keeping it to an hour left them wanting more.  The only thing I'll change next time is minimizing the sugar intake so they can settle in for Grandma and Grandpa.  Well, that and spiking their Gatorade with Children's Benadryl.   

Accidental Muskie

With the new season just a week old, I ventured out onto Thornapple Lake this past Friday.  I spent another rough night on the couch so that I could get up early without waking Michelle.  The alarm was set for 4:00, but I woke up for about the 15th time at 3:45 and decided that I might as well just get up.  With no traffic, I made record time and was on the lake well before light.

The first thing that I did was check the water temperature and I found it to be 55 degrees.  I then loaded a 3-inch Berkley Alive Minnow on a jig and dinked around trying to find an active walleye.  With no luck by the time the sun finally rose, I decided to break in the new muskie gear.  I began by throwing a bluegill pattern Super Shad.  I liked the feel of the rod and the Cardiff casted and reeled like a dream.  I did get careless a couple of times and allowed myself to get some bird nests.  Nothing too terrible.  The worst one only took me a couple of minutes to pick out.  I tried a few other bucktail type lures after the Super Shad didn't cause any fish to show themselves.  After about 30 minutes of fishing with this big gear, I started to realize why the muskie guys say that this type of fishing is hard on the gear and hard on the fisherman.  My hands started getting tired and I could hear the rod creeking a little bit.  I stuck it out for at least another hour.  I watched some other muskie fishermen trolling and casting and noted that they weren't catching anything either.  I decided to give it a rest at around 10:00 and went back to the spinning gear.

In addition to the jig and minnow, I decided to drift a crawler harness a bit further behind the boat.  I held a rod in each hand and got into a rhythm with the boat as it bobbed in the waves.  I kind of excentuated the motion, pulling the spinner on the crawler harness in long jumps.  After 10 minutes, that rod got heavy and I felt a couple of big head jerks.  I wasn't under the illusion that this was a walleye for very long.  I had a pretty good idea that it was a pike or a muskie.  The fish stayed down for a long time and just swam with me as the boat drifted.  I made sure that the drag wasn't too tight and took my time with the big fish.  I kept an eye out behind me to make sure that I was keeping my distance from shore.  I didn't want to drop the anchor for fear that the fish would wrap the rope and get off.  After several minutes, it finally surfaced 15 feet behind the boat.  Once I had the fish up, I went ahead and dropped the anchor to keep from getting too shallow or running into shore.

I knew that I had my hands full with this fish, and especially with the old net that we have on our boat.  I managed to net the fish with little problem, but I immediately became worried about injuring it.  I got the hook out while the fish was still in the water, but it thrashed quite a bit and got itself tangled pretty bad in the mesh.  I really had to work hard to get it out of there, my last move being removing a large chunk of net from its mouth.  It seemed to want to bite anything that it could get its teeth into.  I snapped one quick picture, measured it at 38-inches and got it right back into the water.  It took quite awhile to get the fish revived, but it finally swam back down into the dark water.  If I'm going to go after these fish and really take care of them, I've got to get a good net.  I may ask for an advance on my Father's Day gift.

I fished for the rest of the day, targeting anything that might bite.  I threw spinner baits, numerous crankbaits, and spent a good portion of the day drifting for walleye.  I couldn't get anything going.  I went home feeling a bit unfulfilled.  While I was grateful to catch the muskie, I only did so by dumb luck.  I wasn't even targeting muskies when I caught it.  In fact, I hadn't caught a fish on purpose all day. Like most fishermen, I get quite a bit of satisfaction out of figuring out a pattern and using it to produce fish.  This early spring fishing is pretty tough.  The good news is that it improves with every new day.

Practically Skunked

My muskie starter kit was completed this week when the Shimano Cardiff 400 that I ordered finally arrived on Monday.  This lit my fire to go chase them, so I put together a plan to spend all day Friday on Thornapple Lake.  I'd have to get the boat from my parents' house, so while I was up there on Wednesday to pick it up I figured I might as well spend a few hours on the river.

Even though just about everything is open, including catch and release for bass, things still aren't hopping on the river.  When the fish get into their summer pattern a crawler at the end of your line will rarely go more than a few minutes before something finds it and picks it up.  I barely scraped up a couple of suckers to use for cutbait.  The only other fish that I caught in the 3 or 4 hours before dark was a 3-pound channel.  Still, my experience this year has been that slow days on the river doesn't necessarily mean slow nights.  The channels had come through for me each night no matter how bad the fishing was during the day.  I figured that the pattern would continue.

To make a long story short, I was dead wrong.  The Grand River catfish had a collective case of lockjaw.  I fished my 3 rods for 2 1/2 hours and never got a single bite.  Not a twitch, not a nudge, not a tap, not a tickle.  They were completely shut down.  The water temperature remained at 57 degrees, but the air temperature dropped down to 40 before I left at 11:30.  This must have had something to do with it.  I don't think I've ever had a night where I didn't even get a bite.  It was kind of amazing.  Wouldn't have called that one.  I consoled myself with the notion that this was really just a bonus trip and the real fishing was going to take place on Friday.  I planned on getting on the lake before sun up and staying out there until after sundown.

The best part of that whole night happened as I was leaving the house.  Luke asked to walk me out.  I said good-bye to him in the driveway and got in the Jeep to hit the road.  I looked up as I was backing out and he was sitting on the steps giving me thumbs up.  I can't exactly put to words why, but this really warmed my heart.  It was just a simple gesture from the little guy, but it brought to my mind that famous footage of JFK Jr. saluting his dad during the funeral procession.  I realize that Luke's dad is just some schmuck heading out fishing and not in the league of a fallen president.  I think it was more about the boy than the dad in this situation.  It was just a nice little reminder of how much I love that kid and how much our growing father-son relationship means to me.  The river sure wasn't good to me, but I went to bed feeling blessed that night.