For the Love of Fishing
I took a road trip this week with tournament director Cynde Ploor to the southern ports participating in the Baileys Harbor Brown Trout Tournament. This gave us an opportunity to meet some of the business owners and staff at the various locations that support the tournament. It also gave me...
You don’t need a boat to take part in the Baileys Harbor Brown Trout Tournament. The vast majority of anglers participating each year fish out of a boat. Most of the top fish caught over the years have been by trolling various artificial baits near shore or just offshore. Boats...
Up until the recent winter storm, the bayside and much of the lakeside looked like we could be getting out on open water chasing brown trout by early March. The satellite image from February 19th (see below) showed the lake and much of the bay ice free. Most of the...
As we rumbled out onto the ice of Green Bay, where in a normal winter, we would gaze out over a sprawling “WhitefishTown”, all that could be seen was a modest whitefish hamlet, comprised of about a dozen dark red guide shacks surrounded by a menagerie of blue Clams, red...
One of the best ways to get an overall sense of the ice conditions on Green Bay and area lakes is to access the MODIS satellite images of Lake Michigan on the NOAA Coast Watch Great Lakes website. These are real color images developed by the University of Wisconsin Madison Space Science...
Seventeen days. This was the time between the last outing on open water and my first step out on a frozen surface of ice to drill holes. Paul and I made a fruitless quest for brown trout (or whatever would hit our lures) to Egg Harbor early in December. With...
Now the slips are all empty, let the diehards take the stage. The marinas around the county are abandoned. Most boat owners have stored their boats in clean, dry spaces or wrapped them, mummy-like, in protective plastic. The piers that spent the summer months serving watercraft, have been pulled and are...
Perhaps we should not have gone fishing this day. It was overcast and cold with a blustery, biting wind. The forecast was for rain and “the S-word” was even mentioned. What kind of fool goes out in weather like that? On the other hand, this would be our last chance...
I was skeptical as I tentatively backed the trailer towards the broken concrete launch ramp. “I don’t know if this is going to work, Ed” I whined. “Looks pretty shallow.” Ed and I were looking for a way to get the boat out onto the waters of Lake Michigan to...
