Absolutely 

just look for lanterns

It’s been a slow spring.  I’ve been out just about every week this year, from standing on the ice one week, to shore fishing the next. Some trout here and there, with the odd bass or two. Even managed a small pike already.

A mere cup of coffee these days…

The missus and I fished a lake in northern Brown County a couple of days ago and, just like the
weather, the fishing was, well, just plain weird. The dogwood trees are screaming that it is time
for the crappie spawn so that was our target species.   On her first cast, "the warden" caught a
brightly tuxedoed 11" crappie.  We're in them I thought, so we released it, the first caught, for
good luck.  We didn't catch another spec for over an hour.  What we did catch, in all of the good
crappie locations, was a pile of bluegills, redears and small LMB.  The action was fast and furious
but the crappies were pretty much no shows.  The ones we did catch were all males in their tuxes
with small undeveloped sperm sacs. We kept a few of each species and will be able to enjoy
a couple of panfish dinners.  While we caught a good number of fish, we had at least as many
false strikes where something would take a whack at the 2" twister tail but not hook up - again
weird.  The weather probably was responsible for some of this as the temps in the three days
before we went alternated between 36 and 82 degrees and the wind was howling, at one time or
another from every direction but the west... We were in a 17 ft fiberglass canoe and I tried to
hold position for her to cast.  Oh yeah, she caught most of the fish... All in all a good day on the
water.

fish on, 

rivereddy