Andrew's Adventures

Wisconsin Trib Kings and Cohos

Thu, October 27, 2011

I finally have an opportunity to get to my delayed story from this past weekend. I can thank its accompanying video as well as my own website’s virus for this delay.

The video was shot entirely with my dinky little GoPro camera, and it was edited and put together over the course of the last four nights. During the weekdays, since I only have time to fish the nighttime hours for river walleyes (which we are catching and I will have a separate story shortly), I’ve had to force myself to stay up until 2am the last few nights just to get this done. And for the camera, this is not bad if you asked me!

As for the virus my site caught, it’s almost fixed – according to my website’s hosting company and google. If not, a database will be deleted and I will have to rebuild it into something new. No big deal, but I don’t want any unnecessary work to do unless it’s entirely needed. This is a terrible situation because I do not want to lose invaluable content and fishing information. But that’s the price you pay in order to get things disinfected and cleaned out.

Unless you like to watch videos, I don’t have much in the way of storytelling and typing to do today. However, I will provide some details that I was not able to fit into the screenwriting I did for this video.

On Sunday 10/24, my friend, Michael Planthaber, and I fished a Lake Michigan tributary in Eastern Wisconsin. The river we fished is located midway between the cities of Milwaukee and Green Bay; It was a solid 130 mile one way trip just to get there, and a 260 mile round-tripper.

We left at 6am and arrived by 9am. We fished until 3pm, and we returned home by six. These types of trips can be described as “Fishing on Crack.” This is Mike’s specialty.

We traveled all this distance to avoid the weekend crowds that likely would have been present at the more local tributaries south of Milwaukee, such as the Milwaukee, Root, and Pike Rivers. We didn’t want to deal with the crowds and neither did we want to fish shoulder to shoulder for pressured, and less numbers of fish.

On this river, we had much of the flow all to ourselves. By 11am, the other anglers who fished the morning hours had left, and our group was the only anglers who were still fishing. As the day went on, and overcast skies rolled in, more fish were finding our egg patterns, and they were growing more aggressive as they were in search of their mates and spawning grounds. I’m pretty sure that everyone who had left made a huge mistake because we started catching them like crazy from 11:30am until 2pm.

Mike was anticipating on us having a 20 to 40 fish day (cumulative for four people), but amongst our group of four, we flied in a respectable 15 to 20 fish in around five hours; a combination of kings and cohos. In my situation - as someone who rarely fishes for salmon or trout, let alone not often like this - this was a very good outing.

According to Mike, the run had peaked a week or two before and these fish were only the discards that were still left in the river system. Rain is needed in order to push in some fresh and unmolested fish from the lake. Unless more rainfall fills up this river system, it likely won’t have very many fish left in it.

Also worth noting is the observation that there were more dead fish in the river than alive ones. I’d say the ratio was ten dead fish (kings mostly) per every one that was still alive. This is a sign that the fall run will be concluding shortly.

Thanks for an awesome day of fishing, Mike!

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