Category: Fishing

For whatever reason this lake has my number, but I do feel relieved that lots of teams struggled at this tournament. I am still yet to travel to the North end of the lake and fish. This was where we originally were headed and so was everyone else! That was until I saw a point that peaked my interest and so we broke off from the pack and tried the point. I am not a crowd follower! We had one short fish blow up on a frog and Dustin had a decent hit on a Texas rigged worm but no fish. So instead of following everyone else I decided we should head back towards the island. There is lots of deep water with trees and I’ve never truly figured out how to fish trees in 40 feet of water especially when it’s 40 feet of water 5 feet from the bank. I know the fish are there. I was flipping trees and trying to let my jig drop the whole way down but I’m not very patient and so I started just swimming my jig about 5 feet down and BAM! A 15″ bass hammered me! But one fish is luck so we were looking for a 2nd fish to make a pattern and wouldn’t you know… not 2 mins later doing the same thing I caught our biggest bass of the day a 3.5lber that was tagged by ISU! (more later) Now we are on to something right? Nope… as we continued up the creek arm, the duckweed and cheese mats were just too much of a draw and out comes the frog. From 9:30am to about 10:30am if you threw a frog close to a bass he would BLOW out of the water and reveal himself. On top of that he would blow up 3-4 times before finally getting hooked up. So much fun but we only managed one more keeper this way and several short fish. Unfortunately, the keeper we did catch on the frog somehow hooked itself on the bottom of the throat and was bleeding pretty bad! We cleaned the livewell water and added my favorite G-Juice additive and the fish seemed to be alright but was not great. This is the tough part because you have to decide… throw him back while they are still alive or keep em and hope they don’t die and give you a 1lb penalty. We made the decision the way the bite seemed to be going that we would keep it in hopes that we could catch 3 more fish to cull him out. Bugger made it till 1:30pm before finally expiring and we were unable to add another fish anyway so culling was out. Oh Well.

Tagged Bass Info: Bass #6531 was caught first in May on a Sunday tourney and weighted 3.9lbs. She weighed only 3.5lbs the day I caught her. Length was virtually the same at 19″ to 19.25″. Sounds like next year will conclude ISU’s study.

I try to at least learn one new thing at each of these tournaments, and I think the take away from this one is that I need to switch to a spinning rod and wacky worm more… sounded like this was a good tactic to pick up a couple of fish in the trees. I also, need to take the time to fish the North end as there has to be something that causes everyone to go there first thing! A highlight of the trip was a GIANT Musky that followed my jig all the way back to the boat and as my heart jumped out of my chest trying to decided if I wanted to hook him or not he slowly sank away solving my dilemma. But what a gorgeous fish! But even though the result wasn’t as good as we had hoped catching up with Dustin the night before breaking in his new camper was a such a blast! I do always enjoy our time together especially on the water!

Oh well… there is always NEXT YEAR and now to concentrate on Deer!!!

It has been awhile since I’ve posted anything new so figured it was time to do so.  So what has AMO been up to?  Well my buck has been officially scored and was officially accepted into Pope & Young at 156 6/8ths.  Just need to make a mount for him and rearrange the wall of fame in the basement.  I have also applied to become a Pope & Young Official measurer and am awaiting sponsor letters of recommendation and will keep you posted on that as well. With all this going on we jumped into ice fishing.  We have had great ice for quite a bit of the winter now and unfortunately we haven’t taken quite as much advantage fishing as we should have.  We have really only hit the pond but boy has the pond really bounced back from the winter kill!  We did however take full advantage of the ice on the pond and have built 2 new docks on the pond and replenished multiple brush piles and drove 9 trees into the water like posts!  If these posts stay standing and the water returns to normal pool then they should make for fantastic crappie structure in the Spring!  We did get a fairly decent gathering for an afternoon at Hickory on the ice and only Mike Olson and Dustin Eighmy caught more than one fish.  We decided to bail and took everyone to the pond were the fish were eager to eat!  That pretty much saved the day for everyone.  That is about it. Next month my 2nd child should be born and then turkey season starts up in April.  I have heard a rumor that the Meimanns will be visiting from Idaho and there maybe a morning turkey hunt and hopefully some fishing in the future with one of the original founders!  Pretty exciting and stay tuned for those outtings!

Well another HG tourney has come and gone.  Common in the fall are cold fronts and boy did one blow thru Thursday/Friday.  Along with that front came about an 1″ of cold rain, and then  Friday night the high pressure moved in and cleared up the skies and brought the chilly temps.  We had hoped that the East Side, being quite dirty, would still be one of the warmest spots on the lake and we could pick up one of the 17″+ fish that we had been catching during the last couple weeks.  However, this wasn’t the case.  The rain waters were still running in and had cooled the lake almost 8 degrees in the last couple days.  This gave the fish over there lock-jaw.  We were able to get two fish to blow up at the frog. (both fish missed the frog the first pass and then hit on the 2nd go round.  They were a 13″ and 16″.    With time slowly disappearing and no fish being picked up any other way, we abandoned the east side and headed down lake.  At this point we knew the fish weren’t up on the bank like we had hoped and thus we started working the first and second depths.  I tied on a KVD squarebill crankbait and started casting.  We worked the South Shore and when we came across Blue Heron Point (I think that’s the name)  we ran into a school!  we picked up 9 of our overall 12 fish off this point and, unfortunately, as good as they were eating the KVD we couldn’t get the BIG bite we wanted.  Seeing how all the fish were between 11 and 14″ and needing something over 17.5″ for the win we headed down to the dam to try our luck dragging worms and craws.  This turned out to be the nail in our coffin!  The West end of the Lake was just absolutely dead.  (Very few measurements were even taken from this end of the lake was the rumor).  Looking back at the tourney and how the weather was playing out this made absolutely a lot of sense. Bottom line is the wind.  It played a huge impact on where I feel the fish were positioned and am just realizing that too late. With the wind blowing up the lake like it was, it forced all the bait fish ( which were feeding on a giant trico hatch from the morning) up lake who were followingthe wind blown insect corpse and the bass were right behind bait fish.  Now, what should we have done is stayed up lake.  We should have circled back a couple more times and switch up lures.  I’m sure now that the winning fish was in the school we found we just need to find the lure or the depth that it was at.  So all in all it was good day on the water and hopefully it has paved the way for a lot more fish in the future with what I learned.

I have added over 40 images of Our Shark Fishing adventure!  They are located at this link.

Hawaii Shark Photos

To the Guy form Oregon I hope you remembered my website and find this link.  I think the pictures of you and your shark turned out quite well!  If you want full sized images shoot me your email and I will be happy to send them to you.

Happy Fishing!

Videos for both sharks caught are here.

Hawaii Shark Videos