vacation time in the North Country Fair

[no1son]

Gotta run.

Off to a week long family gathering on a lake near Brainerd starting Sat.; so there are some last minute things to take care of, including assembling some 12 dozen eggs for camp breakfast a week from next Thursday. With over a hundred of us there won't be any left overs from them either. Adding some peppers, some garlic, onions, and tomatoes and any left over breakfast meat from around the camp will spice it up a bit, and a cousin will be adding the pancakes; so nobody leaves hungry from that feast.

Should be fishing stories and pictures come out of that week, too, including some slabs and maybe a bullgill or two and possibly even some green carp and a pike or two, if prior years are any indication. This year I plan to add some dock shooting and work the thermocline some due to the current heat wave. In past years the outside weedline had been enough, until it crapped out last summer under similar heat. We've been doing this for some 5 decades now as the family has grown from about a single initial couple and their kids to well over a hundred of us now with some four generations in some cases in camp at the same time. Nice modern camp well run by a young couple and their growing kids, and we pack it to capacity this one week out of the year. We've moved around some over the years, but with a group this size, it is getting a whole lot harder; so we tend to stay put as long as we can to suit all the different budget levels involved across the group.

Now its down to Iowa to help my aging mother and one sister get their stuff together, back up here on Friday to get mine organized and then off to fishing and other family recreations.

[IMFSHN]

Looks like Mother Nature heard you were leaving and decided to water your garden. Went out last night -a little slow with no crappies over 8", but the cooler temperature and glass lake made up for it.

[no1son]

This is a billion dollar rainy period. Upper Midwest crops are in dire need of this water. For some fields it is already too late, but I do not begrudge a few washed out fishing trips nor my muddy garden being to soggy to dig potatoes. Not one little bit. Corn is tassling with silking ears across Minnesota and this water will fill many of them out. It will also result in a much heavier set of bean flowers in soybean fields.

A little inconvenience for me is pretty much nothing by comparison.

I did manage about 15 minutes of fishing down in Iowa last week on a river as low as I have ever seen it. About all I managed were a couple of pike strikes, and when the last one resulted in a hook up and then a cut off, I put away the rod and went in to supper. Both takes were in about 6" of water out of a pool no deeper than a couple of feet below a very small flow out of a short dam. Probably the same fish and it came right up to my toes. Our Upper Midwest pike are remarkably adaptable fish and they have been through this kind of drought before. Certainly there will be mortality, but the species will survive it all over the state. Pike, walleyes and smallmouth bass have been in that piddly little prairie river for as long as I can remember, and lately it has also been producing some really large flatheads as well as the standard channel cats it has always had.

I fish it with crappie plastics and expect action of some kind on every outing. Everything except the flatheads downsize in that water, and the smallmouths still occasionally make 4 to 5 pounds with the occasional walleye that pushes 20". It is also about the only flowage that still maintains healthy populations of Topeka shiners, one of the healthiest populations anywhere of that endangered species.

Native adaptations are pretty impressive, when they are not interfered with.

[IMFSHN]

It is also about the only flowage that still maintains healthy populations of Topeka shiners, one of the healthiest populations anywhere of that endangered species.

Native adaptations are pretty impressive, when they are not interfered with.

That is coincidental - Z did a report on the Topeka Shiner for a conservation project for cub scouts last year.

Went out on Tonka this morning. Got the boat in at Grey's just as the rain started to pound. we procured a spot on a side dock, and found shelter in the walkway between the two rest rooms. Of course there was a lady there smoking-right underneath a No Smoking sign, my fishing buddy pointed out later. when the rain slowed a bit, proposed going and jigging under the overpass in the channel. The south side was taken by another boat, so we took the north. of course there are always shore fishermen there, and my friend though it a good idea to pull in perpendicular to the center support opening. As we did this, I told him that it was pretty clear that he hasn't fished from shore much. After seeing the perplexed look on his face, I informed him that this center support opening was their access to cast into the channel. We have the whole lake at our finger tips, and here we are sitting in the middle of their dinner table. We lifted anchor, drifted out, during which, I nabbed a keeper crappie as a little karmic thank you.

We hit some Smallies along a shoreline, and then took off for some Walleye, of which we caught one 16.5" fish.

Have a fun reunion.

[no1son]

Got home this morning. Vacation is over for another year.

Pretty nice week of fishing. The politics and religion wore a bit thin. Still a lot of family (total 104 at max with a couple of lines running a full four generations) and blood is thicker than water after all. We are pretty close and it was good to see a whole lot of them, some from as far away as Michigan and Ohio with one guest from Japan. Both missionary nieces who were in Africa earlier this year were also there. Not being religious myself it would have been a little much to take, but they gave up trying to convert me to anything a long time ago; so peace prevailed and I was under no pressure to participate.

We caught our crappies, enough for a couple of big meals for the nine of us in our sub group and still sent home three parties with full legal limits,and one sister with a whole pile of rock bass to pickle. Normally I don't harvest, but the Matriarch (my aging mother) decreed so I bent a little. Thursday morning breakfast only scrambled 10 dozen eggs this year and I have no idea how many pancakes cousin Gregg did up. We eat good, this week at least, real good. One treat we always enjoy is radish sandwiches during this week. My daikons came in real well, almost big enough around to be ball bats, and one almost two feet long. You get lots of slices from a single one, and these are mild not at all hot like some of the big autumn radishes are. Lots of sweet corn, too, although due to the drought the ears were small, and not quite up to previous years' standards, also new potatoes, garden ripe tomatoes, and even onions brought up a few weeks back by a cousin from Texas, big sweet Spanish ones, also garlic and peppers from my own garden. The big jalapeno was real hot, even for me so I cut that out of the peppers for the scrambled eggs. My garlic went in though. Music produces nice big cloves and just two of them in all those eggs perfumed and actually woke up most of the camp...

My older sister did her "dump dinner" one evening. The table gets a cheap plastic throw cover, every one gets a paper dish for butter, bbq sauce or ketchup and she pours boiled sausage, new potatoes, carrots, onions, chunks of sweet corn ears and anything similar right down the center and everyone digs in with their fingers. Dishwashing consists of bundling up the cob chunks the paper bowls into the table cover and tossing it in the garbage, no plates or flatware to wash. Everyone likes the butter off their fingers.

This is the week that my mother and sister, use my late father's 12' Alumicraft boat as a trailer and I normally get to run it on the water. 8 hp Evinrude and 30 rated electric and an ancient 'bird for a depth finder. It worked for him and it worked for us. There was no trip out where any fisherman got skunked. A couple of times there were four of us in that boat, but that worked out ok, at the slow fishing speeds I used.

It was hot and bright for most of the week; I limited my outings to early morning and evening, except for one day where it stayed overcast with intermittent rain and then I went out by myself for about an hour and a half just before noon one day. Other times everybody had trouble finding crappies mid day. Most fishing was before breakfast and after supper, the rest of the day spent napping, reading and socializing. I spent so little midday time on the water that it wasn't until Thursday that I actually sunburned enough to be annoying.

We found our crappies on the stepped breaklines between 6/7 fow and 10/12 in a combination of slow trolling, casting and vertical jigging on controlled drifts. Crappies averaging 8-10" were a bit smaller than in previous years but in real good flesh, no paper thins. Another fisherman with a camera told me that the first break beyond the tall weeds very often has a shorter weed growth and he would see the crappies often laying in the top of those weeds. From the depths that we found our fish, it seems to me that the crappies were using a number of the break steps, depending on the day; so I ran my drifts and trolling passes back and forth over them as much as I could. Biggest crappies in my boat were a couple of 12"+ fish taken by one sister. One uncle reported that one of his kids' parties brought in a 15" but knowing him that fish had not been taped and probably maxed no more than 12 or 13, it just looked huge to him, and he is not one to underestimate much.

Tubes and rat tailed shads accounted for all our fish with a lot of rock bass thrown in, some sunnies up to 8"+, some bass, and a few hammer handles, some landed, some cutoffs. Others scored with minnows or twistertails or some combination.

Mostly we used 32nd oz jig heads. I experimented with the Kalin 32nd oz head that has the wire hook as the plastic tail keeper, but I got a lot of twisted line from that so I am not very satisfied with that jig head. I have not been particularly impressed with any of the Kalin products, but I thought I would try these specific heads. The wire part worked fine, but it seems to me like the balance is off enough so that unless you rig the plastic perfectly it is going to spin and twist the line.

One thing that worked for us was a slow troll with a decent cast out to get the light jigs down as far as possible and then moving back over where a crappie was hooked and vertical jigging on that spot. When I could get that right we brought in a number of bonus crappies, including some doubles.

All in all a pretty decent week and reports from my sister after they got back to Iowa this afternoon, was that it was pouring rain. Most of the clan is from farming country and the severity of the drought in their areas was never far from anybody's mind all week. It looks like for their areas some of that has finally been releaved, at least for those fields where it is not already too late.