Wednesday, 11/26/08
My eldest brother Chuck & I arrived at the boat launch in Merrimac around 10:30am and what we saw was pretty much what I expected to see. Lots & lots of ice and very few if any open water areas to fish in. Not a problem. One of the best tricks I've ever learned is how clear ice away from areas that I want to fish using my 18' lund and extend our late season walleye & sauger fishing for another week or two.
So, after spending a half hour or so clearing ice from the area we wanted to target around the rail road bridge, we finally dropped our lines, rigged with paddletails & tipped with minnows, over the side of the boat.
Surface water temperatures were 34-35 degrees and because of that, we kept our presentations on the slow side. Another words, very little if any jigging at all!
Even though the overnight temperatures had dropped down to 15 degrees, today's afternoon temperatures topped out at about 40 degrees. Factor in the total lack of wind, zero cloud cover and what we ended up with was a really nice day for this time of the year. It has probably been 20 years since the last time Chuck and I shared a boat. We could not have asked for a better day for this time of the year.
Darkness finally forced us off the water but we had a pretty productive five hours of fishing. We tallied up a total of 13 saugers & one walleye. Two saugers were over the 20" mark, five were in the legal, keeper size range and the rest were shorts.
We switched the colors on our jig heads and paddletails often at first and found several that produced for us. The paddletails & jigs that I use by the way are made by B'Fish'N Tackle Company.
Our best depth today was in 21-22' of water .
