Today I had the pleasure of fishing with my buddy, Dan, who was present when I caught the biggest fish of my life. We didn’t have a boat and given all the hot weather lately, we thought our best luck for catching any fish would be in the Mississippi River. We thought the lake fish would be in deeper water that we wouldn’t be able to cast to.
We decided to meet at Hidden Falls Park in St. Paul at 8:30am, but when I got there, the park was blocked off with barricades. It turns out there was a 5K run going on and they weren’t letting any vehicles in to the park. I called Dan and after some discussion, we decided to hit a city lake instead. We settled on Lake Nokomis.
We got to the lake a little after 9:30am after a bit of a hunt to find Dan a 24 hour fishing license. We tried the pier first. The water was pretty stained with only a foot or two of visibility, so I threw a bubble gum super fluke and Dan picked an orange/brown spinnerbait. With no nibbles after about 15 minutes, we decided to proceed down the shore to one of the sandy beaches.
We waded in to our knees and started casting again. Not long after, we saw a fish jump between us and the pier. Dan said it was a bass. I quickly cast my fluke toward the spot, but several casts yielded nothing. I decided to switch to a Texas rigged worm while Dan switched to a blue jig and pig. I felt some resistance reeling, but when I tried to set the hook, I got nothing.
Some more time passed and we saw another bass jump not far from the first one. Our new lures weren’t producing, so we switched again. This time, we tried topwaters since the fish seemed to be feeding on something on the surface. I opted for a chartreuse scum frog. Dan picked a surface popper. Neither of those produced either. I then switched to a propeller frog and Dan went with and under surface lure I can’t remember. We still didn’t get a bite, but another bass down the shore decided something just above the surface looked appetizing and jumped to grab it. Dan just looked at each other, flabbergasted.
We walked down the shore a little and decided to switch to something smaller. Dan picked a chartreuse beetle spinner and I went with a jighead with dirty yellow grub trailer. On one of my first few casts, I finally hooked one! It turned out to be an 8″ largemouth. It shook itself off before I could get a picture to prove that I didn’t get skunked. The beetle spinner Dan was using was a little too light to cast, so he switched to a heavier pink headed clear body with speckles. He and I kept feeling some tugs about 10 ft in front of us and we decided there was a weedline out there we couldn’t see. I stuck with my jig and Dan eventually switched to a pink jighead with yellow grub body. In our last stitch effort, Dan put on a white pearl super fluke while I tried a chartreuse double blade spinnerbait. But we didn’t have any more action for the rest of the morning before we had to leave.
The good news is that there was fish all around us. The bad news is that we couldn’t figure out what they would bite. So to all you bass experts out there, what would you have tried?
[Author’s note: the picture above was taken from the Minneapolis Park and Rec web site. I was too busy chatting with Dan to remember to take any pictures.]
3″ Senko, green pumpkin color. Big fish eat the m. Small fish eat them. they cast well and you can sink them on the outside edge of a weedbed
How do you rig it?