Date: 5/24/2009
Time: 7-9pm
Body of water: Poplar Lake
Location: Gunflint Trail
Weather Conditions: clear
That last evening, we decided to fish our favorite fishing hole. It’s in a shallow bay that gets to only about 1 ft deep, but has a hole 4-5 ft deep. There always seems to be fish there.
When we got there, there we three boats around us. One was smack in the middle of the bay with two dogs fishing with a bobber. We mozied up to the South shore and made some casts before sneaking around the other boat toward the hole. There was no action on the South shore, but both Ken and I caught our largest smallies ever there.
When we first got to the bay, I thought I saw a fish splash behind the boat near the hole, but I wasn’t sure. As we got closer, we saw several splashes from fish feeding on the surface. Ken and I got excited.
We tossed some flukes into the hole, but none of the fish were interested in anything but what they were already feeding on. Ken had forgotten his tackle box this trip, so I was left to try some lures from my arsenal. I tried top waters, spinners, and even tried to cast a fly. Have you ever tried to cast a feather? That doesn’t work that well.
In the course of the hour we were there, Ken lost one of his lures from a bad knot, my fishing pole came apart in one cast, and one of my spools got tangled. It was a comedy of errors. All the while, fish were splashing the surface every minute or so. It’s like they were taunting us. Ken and I were having a good old time laughing at all the things that went wrong. It was exciting to see all the fish, but frustrating that we couldn’t get any of them to strike.
We finally gave up and tried the South shore of an island owned by Ken’s cousin. I had a couple of hits using a super fluke, but wasn’t able to hook any of them. This was the only outing all weekend that I didn’t have a good, hard strike. But 5 nice smallies over 3 days was still a nice haul.
