Filed under: How To..., Video — admin @ 10:21 am
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Filed under: Observations, Video — admin @ 4:25 am
The walleye fishing was dead so we switched to some real fish. This fish was caught near Ely, MN - ground zero for the famed BWCA Canoe Area. The date was May 10. The water temperature was around 50 degrees F.
No we weren’t canoeing or portaging as I was a week out from Achilles Tendon re-attachment surgery. Yes, you can say OUCH!
We went up into a small feeder river from a large lake and found a pack of hungry smallmouth in a corner hole. I’m not sure if these fish over-wintered there or whether they’d come into to feed prior to the spawn, which was about a month away.
Fishing for Spawning Bass - I’m Against It.
I read an article in a local paper, by a pretty big name, about the fun of fishing smallmouth on when they are on their spawning beds. I don’t see anything fun or funny about ripping extremely vulnerable animals up and away from their natural life cycle of attempting to repopulate their species.
In Minnesota, smallmouth spawn as the water approaches the mid to upper 60’s and will be easy prey as water in the low 70’s will see fish plainly protecting nests.
This is one of my favorite times of the year to go trout fishing now-a-days. I give the smallies some time to do their thing. I do the same with largemouth bass, steelhead and other shallow water fish vulnerable when they spawn.
Minnesota fishing laws open the bass seasons just in time for shallow water sniping - I’ve never quite understood that one.
Nothing is more repugnant than seeing some gonzo rockstar bass-head cruising the shallows in a 30K Ranger with their polarized glued to the shallows hunting bedded fish.
They rip them off their beds and chuck them in the live well for a fun trip bouncing around lake all day in preparation for the all important weigh-in! (Oh, they laugh and say how tough it was to catch them - how they finessed it for 15 minutes and finally picked the right bait that the bass will attempt to remove to protect its eggs - if they lip hook them at all! )
There…I feel a little better. This is one of the aspects of fishing that cuts me to the quick!
Let me know how you feel about ripping bedded fish. If I upset a few of you “afishianados” out there - too bad.
Filed under: How To..., Video — admin @ 11:17 am
I’ll call this the Swisher Knot, since that’s where I first saw it tied in the late 80’s by Doug Swisher himself. Swisher visited a local fly shop in Minneapolis and gave a talk on fly fishing. I’d already owned several of his 3M series on fly casting, which I still believe are some of the best I’ve ever seen. The fishing action interspersed in them is priceless.
He shows this knot, I believe in one of those videos. Here is how I use it to tie a fly to a tippet or a jig to monofilament for other types of fishing. It has all the traits of a great knot: easy to learn, easy and fast to tie, and strong. Take a look at the video below and give the Swisher Knot a try. And Doug, if you ever read this, tell me where you got it!