My friend Brian and I went to our fishing trailer this weekend for our annual Mississippi smallie excursion.
We had quite the little adventure in an area they call the chutes. It's basically hundreds of little islands where the Black river runs into the Mississippi to form Lake Onalaska. There's tons of water with lots of braided currents, sandbars, rocks, and stumps -- basically smallie heaven.
To make a five hour ordeal short, we got very "turned around." We've been going up there for years without a problem, but the water was just high enough to make everything look a little different. It was pouring for the first hour, just to add to the fun. I was out of the boat countless times to pull us over a sandbar to what we hoped was they way out, only to find another dead end. I stepped off the edge of one bar and barely clambered back into the bow. We were never really in serious trouble and actually had a good time laughing at ourselves. Brian kept spouting made-up headlines like, "TWO FISHERMEN FOUND CLINGING TO ISLAND" -- When asked what they needed they replied 'beer and deet.' "
I took this one when we finally found Gibb's chute, our way home.
No smallies on this trip, but we got a good story out of it. I'm sure that it will become more and more perilous in the telling, until finally, years from now, we will have actually spent two nights surviving on river water and cat tail roots.
Later we decided to stay in the lake and fish for gills. We didn't find the big ones, but the ones we did find were very cooperative. We caught them two at a time more often than not. As you can see color made no difference. We ended up throwing what I would consider really big bluegill stuff to catch the moderate sized ones we kept. Beetle spins, little cleos, kastmasters, roadrunners, all the stuff you would normally throw at schooling white bass. It was a blast.
I caught one nice crappie that warranted a minor celebration.
We sorted through the dinks and kept 15, which resulted in a nice little pile of meat.
We'll be back up in September, hopefully for a few more smallies and little less adventure.