Time Flies When You're Having Fun!

So often I sit down to write a blog or post to my website and I struggle to find the words to put on the page. I think back to the fishing action, the trip, the laughs, and the people I am fortuante enough to share that with day in and day out and I can't find a way to put all that emotion into words. My most recent trip/adventure is no exception. Once again this outing went too fast...it felt like I had just arrived and next thing I know everyone had come and left....guess time really does fly when your having fun and catching fish!
I have been blogging and posting fishing reports for 10 years to the internet and I sit down and just think "WOW", people are not going to believe this.....I have that feeling on 8 out of 10 times I sit down to post to this "space" known as fishwithmatt.
I have thought about changing my domain (or buying another) to catchwithmatt.com. Since I am my own marketing manager, one would think that would make more sense when trying to sell people on fishing adventures, catching is usually the key to success. Not many people just want to go fishing, most want to go catching(or so I think). This past weekends trip and fishing adventure was all about "catching"! I have spent 15+ years training for days like this past weekend, at times it shows...tough to beat experience. Prolific in the art of "catching"!
On Friday morning I headed back to Lake Mille Lacs to get back out on the ice and chase the gravel lizards and the jumbo perch. Thanks to my Navionics chip in my Lowrance GPS I headed to a new area in search of fish that have not had any pressure and I was able to find a spot all on my own right away. Shortly after getting set-up on my "juice" I had my company arrive and we proceeded to put the "pappy" on the fish. We started the afternoon with a few lizards and quickly started catching nice jumbo perch. That was until about 4:30....
At about 4:30 in the evening (give or take a few minutes), we started catching lizards and they didn't let up for the better part of an hour. When the fun and chaos was all over we had picked off our limit of "eater" (slot) lizards for everyone and had thrown back lots of fish, numerous big fish(overs)! The above photo is one of many nice limits we were able to catch over the weekend.
When I say "chaos" I mean chaos! The fish would come in so fast and furious it was nearly impossible to get the bait down fast enough. At times I had 3 or 4 fish on my vexilar fl-20 waiting for my bait to get back down near the bottom.

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Here is a short slide show of a few big fish that we were able to catch and release over the weekend. You will see that Jarrett was not waking up for very many of the rattle reel bites, so I continued to catch fish and take self photo's with him sleeping in the back ground. I did manage to catch a 27" er that was tagged, but unfortunately the tag was so old it had grown a heavy coat of moss that I could not get any info off of it. :( It was still pretty cool to see a tagged fish come through my ice hole, especially one that big and old! I also managed a 40" pike yesterday with a young man who had never ice fished before-he was totally freaked out. He thought I was going to hand it off for a photo-his response was "no way"! He thought that thing was pre-historic. The young man's name is Tucker and I can tell you that he is an ice fisherman for life after the great day we had fishing together yesterday. Cool to introduce new people to the sport I love and am so passionate about. When it was all said and we finished the weekend with more over fish then I could count and as many eater size lizards as we wanted to catch. I know we landed over 60 or 70 lizards under the 18" mark. We did also manage a pail full of jumbo perch-bonus!
Now for the part you are all waiting for.. All of our big fish(overs) this weekend fell victim to a #2 gamakatsu octopus hook in either fluorescent orange or fluorescent pink tipped with a golden shiner set about a foot off the bottom on either a tip-up, or a rattle reel. We did also manage some eater size fish on the set lines as well. Most of our eater fish came jigging one of three different baits. I managed a good portion of the fish on a northland spoon-the best 2 were the forage minnow and the macho minnow. The third go to bait that also produced a ton of fish was a #3 rapala jigging shad rap in glow fire tiger. This little bait tipped with a minnow head produced over 40 eater size walleyes over 2 days! All the baits we were jigging were just tipped with a minnow head. The ice report on the north end of Mille Lacs is good. We had 13-15" of good strong (black) ice. There were lots of trucks, cars, and people on the ice this weekend. I am not sure how the bite was for everyone else, but I will tell you that if you want to get into the fish and have a great time I may be able to assist you. ;) Now I have to get packed to head to Vegas for SHOT show. Then I will be back on the pond chasing tail again. Until next time, Fish On!

Comments

[Elin]

So how's the show? On fb you said that more pics are coming... :)