Matt Straw's “Minnesota Finesse” program starts with a rubber-legged bass jig, silicone skirt strands trimmed to variable lengths for radical flare and underwater action.
A long line of boats stretched behind us into a gray chiaroscuro, just after dawn. A frigid wind blew at 36 mph out of the southeast, as it had all night. The blast-off point approached. My partner, Tim Dawidiuk, stared at me. “Do we want to win, or just go fishing?"
I both regret and rejoice at the stupidity and brilliance of my response. We want to win. But our destination was over 20 miles to the northwest, through a hellish tumult of roiling seas. The maelstrom that was Green Bay whipped up 10-foot waves. We battled them for 3 hours to reach Chambers Island, where Chip Porter and I found cookie-cutter 4-pound smallmouths swarming into rocky shallows a few days prior, prefishing for the Sturgeon Bay Open in 1998.
When we finally pulled into that bay on Chambers, a few other boats were already there, but the smallmouths were suicidal anyway. We snap-paused clown-pattern Rapala Husky Jerks and filled the livewell with 4 pounders in short order. We had to. Assaulting 12 footers all the way back to Sturgeon Bay took well over 3 hours. Three times the boat went completely vertical, the bow pointing skyward. I stood straight up on the side of the stern live well. Dawidiuk sat beside me in the cockpit looking like an astronaut waiting for blast off. He’s a captain and a good one. We wouldn’t have lived if he wasn’t…
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More Inside This Issue:
“Sticking” Coldwater Bass: Jerkbait Sorcery North to South
In Largemouth Bass—An In-Fisherman Handbook of Strategies (1990), the Coldwater Period is described as a transition time when largemouths move from deep, winter locations toward shallow prespawn staging and spawning areas. This phase typically sees water
New Normal for Walleyes: Breakthrough Sonar Strategies
If Tom Huynh's been fishing for walleyes in all the wrong places with all the wrong presentations, it's news to the fish. Now five years into a tournament career front-loaded with 1sts, the Western Minnesota based angler with the fitting last name (Huynh sounds like “win”) has wowed everyone who's witnessed his live sonar sorcery, “Huynhing” the last two National Walleye Tour Championships and fortifying an already crowded trophy case.
The Land of Gators: 50-inch Pike of the Yukon
This past June, we completed an amazing In-Fisherman TV trip by catching multiple 50-inch-plus pike from Alaska's fabled Yukon River Drainage, near Holy Cross, about an hour's float plane flight west of Anchorage.
Jumbo Calculus: Formulas for Growing Whopper Perch
Slab is maybe my favorite word in the fishing lexicon. Jumbo is a close second, the term used by some folks to denote double-XL versions of both yellow perch and shrimp, two essential components of a balanced diet, at least here in Wisconsin. A fat 10-incher pulled through the ice seems like a jumbo in my central Wisconsin neighborhood, but drive just over an hour to Green Bay and that same fish is a fairly mundane addition to the bucket.
