Hunt Southwest Minnesota

Our Outdoors: Low Water Angle

Our Outdoors: Low Water Angle
By Nick Simonson

Scattered below the bass tube dragging slowly just beneath the surface of the gin clear water was a herd of fish in every shape and size the small water could offer up.  From my view in the seat of my kayak, I watched the lead bluegills eye up the remaining undulating tentacles of the soft plastic, while the bigger bulls lagged behind, letting the younger year classes do the reconnaissance for the greater school.  Behind them, a couple handfuls of crappies tailed the amassing squad of intrigued fish, each speckle-sided panfish getting larger and larger, until at the back of the pack one of the bigger ones I had seen on the lake in recent years sparked my interest in perhaps coming back that evening with a few flashy jigs and some light tackle in tow. 
Interspersed with the panfish, the black triangle tails of smaller largemouth bass flickered in the morning’s growing light and the shadows of larger ones looming off a few feet away from the integrated school brought me back to my purpose on the small water a short hop from my in-laws’ house.  I lifted the lure from the water and the school scattered and sunk.  The bluegills headed to the shallows, the crappies retreated to the growing weedline, and the bass swam around, a bit confused and perhaps regretful that what appeared to be an easy morsel had suddenly disappeared.  I turned the 10-foot kayak which I had purchased at a discount at the end of last summer and made my way around the dock that had produced a nice pair of 16-inch largemouth prior to my pause to observe the fish around me.
That perhaps is the most enjoyable part of kayak fishing, being so close to the water and what lies beneath the surface.  While certainly the view from the casting deck of any boat provides a wider take on what’s below, being on the surface, a few inches from the fish and in something a bit smaller, seems to make it feel more like a one-on-one experience. Perhaps too, the fish don’t seem to be as disturbed as I coast in toward a target dock or a prime stretch of angling area, such as a reed bed or a set of lily pads, and set up to zip off a silent cast ahead into those bass-holding locations.
Cruising away from the final dock in the stretch of cabins which leads to an area of state-owned shoreline, I stared out over the shallows and watched the form of a big largemouth bass slowly finning its way along the break between the reed-covered natural bank and the emerging weedline.  I loaded the rod and flipped the tube to a point about 15 feet in front of the fish and clicked the bail closed.  I didn’t have to wait long to watch the gray Fireline pop on the surface of the lake and see it tighten from the other end.  Setting the hook hard, the kayak lurched forward, and the bass broke the surface, mouth agape as it tailwalked and slammed down, digging toward the shallows.  Bulldogging through the leafy greens below and into the first few reeds, it powered back up and splashed around, all the while pulling the front of the kayak with it.
I’ve decided that my second favorite part of kayak fishing – especially with the super light model I came into last summer – is the ability of any fish of two pounds or more to move the bow of the boat a bit with a hard run.  It certainly adds to the excitement of the man versus fish contest that makes angling so much fun.  For some reason, I couldn’t help but think what it would be like to hook a 60-inch sturgeon in a kayak and get towed around Lake of the Woods. Meanwhile, the big bucketmouth was giving me all I could handle in the moment. 
A few hard charges and some redirecting eventually brought the largemouth to hand for a quick photo and a release into the shallows alongside my craft, the nose of which was by then firmly planted in the shoreline and the sides were shrouded with the green stems of pencil reeds, as if I had parked to it remain camouflaged from prying eyes.  With my whooping and hollering, and discussing with the fish during the fight, however, I was certain that anyone else on the little lake was likely to have heard me and could have easily picked out my location simply by listening.
With so many ways to fish and having done so from boats both large and small, in canoes and waders, in rushing streams with the fly and on quiet ponds with light tackle, adding kayak angling to the mix has provided a new perspective on my oldest favorite pastime.  From all that can be seen from the low water angle to the personal connection I feel when I’m so close to the action, time spent with rod in hand, paddle balanced across my lap, and enjoying a whole new take on fishing has been a fortunate find…in our outdoors.

Our Outdoors: Fly Fishing Not All About Trout

Our Outdoors: Fly Fishing Not All About Trout
By Nick Simonson

Crappies will take to flashy woolly buggers on the fly rod and make a great warm-water target. Simonson Photo.

With the heat of summer finally settling into the region, those cold-water loving trout which were stocked in area lakes and reservoirs are seeking out the depths, and aside from some cooler hours in the morning and evening, are a bit tougher to target on the fly rod and likely will remain that way until early fall.  Luckily, around the upper Midwest, there are plenty of other fish to take their place on the long rod and many ways to catch them.  What follows are five warm water species to take on with a fly box in tow, hone those fly fishing skills and have a blast all summer long, until things cool down in autumn and trout rise back up into the shallows.

Panfish Plan
No summer would be complete without a warm afternoon in the shallows chasing bluegills, and these feisty panfish give every fly angler a reward for their cast, whether curled tight and well-practiced, or a little shaky when just starting out.  Work the inside edge of weedlines, especially those in shallow bays or along warm sandy beaches that can easily be waded, or cast parallel to them from a boat on the outer edge. Watch for rising fish that are snapping at whatever’s hatching, but don’t be worried about matching those little bugs.  Bluegills will take all sorts of flies from complex dries to basic nymphs to simple foam bugs, but favorites include beetles and rubber-legged spider patterns.

Brown Bombers
For a summertime fight, nothing puts forth its best effort like a smallmouth bass; now double that intensity level if they’ve been hooked on the fly rod. Their acrobatic leaps and hard runs after splashdown will test drag and line management and teach the art of bowing – that is, lowering the tip of the rod to a jumping fish – to prevent them from slingshotting the hook loose from their jaws. While most active in the early morning and late evening light on shallow rock bars, gravel shoals and sandy stretches of the lakes and streams where they reside, these brown bass can be encountered any time of day along these structures and others.  Offer up large baitfish patterns that can be ripped past them and trigger a reaction strike, like Lefty’s Deceiver or toss a crayfish-colored Clouser minnow out there and bump it along the bottom for a solid take.

Specks of Summer
In a lake loaded with crappies, those low light conditions at the end of the day are the best bet for hooking a series of slabs on the fly rod.  During the day though, crappies can be found along weed edges and may require a sinking style line, such as a Type III, to get down to them. With their quick inhale of any fly, slabs can test the focus of even the most attentive fly angler, so watch that line carefully for a slight twitch or jump to signal a take by a crappie on the feed.  As night approaches, look for crappies to rise in the column – sometimes to just below the surface – to snack on whatever imitation you have to throw at them.  Anything that looks like a minnow will work, including Clousers, white, silver, or other flashy woolly buggers, and even crazy Charlie streamers.

White Lightning
A school of white bass is a summertime treasure as these silver-sided fish swarm and smash just about anything pulled in their direction.  Look for splashing along the surface for active fish and get as close as possible without spooking the school.  Drop a cast just beyond the group and strip a streamer of any sort directly through them – but hold on!  The jarring take from a white bass can rip a five-weight from even the tightest grip. With their sprints and circular runs, white bass will put it to any angler’s drag and help teach a whole new level of line management.  Look for those lakes where current year classes are topping 15 inches for some of the most exciting and consistent adventures with the fly rod.  Bucktail streamers like the Thunder Creek work well when white bass are up top, and any pattern with a little weight to it, like the Half-and-Half will get down to a school when they’re feeding deeper.

Rough ‘Em Up
Carp get a bad rap among anglers until they hook one on the fly rod.  Then it’s fifteen minutes of a doubled-over five weight trying to steer thirty inches of scales and stink into the shallows for a slimy photo opportunity, grinning ear-to-ear with a bested “golden bonefish.” Where these rough fish abound, so do some of the most exciting and prolonged flyfishing events of the summer.  Look for carp that are slurping the surface and lay out a cast and get ready for a fun fight on the fly rod but be sure to keep your distance to avoid spooking them. Offer up small nymph patterns or woolly buggers to connect, and in those areas where mulberries make their way into the water along the shore at midsummer, add a few purple foam patterns to the fly box to tangle with the region’s swimming garbage can that’ll eat just about anything from top to bottom in the water column.

Just because you don’t have a mountain stream nearby, and the region’s stocked trout have taken to the depths, doesn’t mean fly fishing season is over.  Use the options around you to sharpen those skills – whether newly-acquired or long-held – and heat things up with these great warm water species to catch on the fly…in our outdoors.

Our Outdoors: Weighty Matters

Our Outdoors: Weighty Matters
By Nick Simonson

Like a Rock. The author’s lab had a notable weight increase after a weather-shortened hunting season last autumn, where pursuit of grouse and pheasants and the effort required (along with calorie burn) was limited. Simonson Photo.

I crossed the finish line inside the Fargodome a few weeks back at the start of the first nice day this non-winter season conveniently had offered up and checked the exercise app on my watch which was tracking my effort.  1:41:33 it read as I clicked the End button on the display.  If correct, I bested my half marathon time by over four minutes.  The next day I checked the official results on my phone and it displayed a time of 1:41:26 which worked out to a pace of 7’45” per mile; not too shabby for a flat-footed 44-year-old who weighed nearly 250 pounds in his junior year of high school. When asked why I run and work out with a heightened level of diligence here in middle age and now 70 pounds lighter, I often cite back to those days as one of the primary reasons.
Just prior to the weekend’s running festivities, I led my yellow lab to the black matted scale at the veterinarian’s office to get his annual shots so he’d be able to visit the boarding facility once again and maintain his overall health for the upcoming fall hunting season, avoiding summer nasties like heartworm carried by mosquitoes and tick-borne illnesses.  Ole is a large creature, and he’s been that way from birth, able to rumble through cattail sloughs carving a walking path at least big enough for me, and sometimes even another hunter.  By the time he was two years old, he had settled into that 100-to-105-pound range, so it’s never a shock to see triple digits show up on the LCD display at the vet. 
While it’s a trite excuse to say Ole is big-boned, he truly is.  He’s also quite muscular, but has a notable layer of fat as well, and if there were a dog fashion runway, he’d likely be the king of the plus-sized models – still good looking, but noticeably bigger than his contemporaries.  So, when the display bounced from the upper teens, then into the low twenties and finally settled back down onto an even 120 pounds as he plopped his behind down on the scale, even I gasped audibly. He was up 13 pounds since the prior spring, and I struggled to come up with an explanation.
With my wife’s German shepherd, we walk five times a day religiously, covering the block with such regularity that I consider us to be the neighborhood watch. We know every pheasant call, from the raspy one on the far side of the draw to that dominant one of the big, backyard-safe bird which patrols the lawns on the east side of the street.  My dog’s bluffed charge frequently sends that rooster with what looks to be a 28-inch tail feather back down into the small drain at the end of his suburban domain, no matter how distant we are from him. As the saying goes, birds don’t get that big by being stupid; but apparently all the walking wasn’t stopping my dog’s size increase.
In the morning, when the two dogs are eating after our first walk of the day, they like to trade bowls repeatedly.  The shepherd is particular and waits until Ole has first eaten some kibble before she nudges him out of the way, and he goes to the other bowl.  I don’t know if she’s having him check it for poison, like I often do with my kids’ chicken nuggets, but it’s obvious that Ole doesn’t mind being the guinea pig for the day’s feeding if he gets a few extra bites.  The extra caloric intake settled in my mind as a likely source of my lab’s weight gain, but there was certainly another one.
Following a 20-inch snowfall the first week in November and a few follow-up weather events, which basically shut down much of our hunting efforts until a few perilous cross-state journeys to less-covered lands, our outings in the field were limited to early season trips for grouse and pheasants in September and October respectively. Where we would normally hunt at least one weekend day until the upland season’s end on the first Sunday in January, we didn’t after the snow fell. 
In those treks, we typically cover miles and miles and miles of terrain.  We hunt hard.  Up hills, through brush, and deep into tangled sloughs.  Like me, Ole doesn’t fear the sweat equity that comes with going to those places birds tend to be, plowing through hell to find upland heaven.   It’s on those journeys that we use up our extra calories, where every mile of blacktop under my running shoes from the summer and under his polar-bear-sized paws in each daily walk pays off, especially in the late season when snow often mandates the additional physical effort. We’re always ready for it.  But when nature takes away half or almost two-thirds of that season, it’s easy to see the results of a more sedentary lifestyle, comparatively speaking. 
So with the vet’s advice of a more monitored feeding program, and the hopes of a longer upland season than the previous one, we enter the summer, with me looking to maintain my pace and weight from a winter of monotonous treadmill running into a summer out in the open, and Ole looking forward to a a seasonal slimdown, chasing bird dummies in the backyard and shedding a couple extra pounds ahead of a long autumn afield.  Through that combination we both hope to find a balance, and put to rest these weighty issues next fall…in our outdoors.

Our Outdoors: Summer Bounce

Our Outdoors: Summer Bounce
By Nick Simonson

With the rapid warm-up over the past week and the unofficial start to the summer season in the books, it’s tough not to think about longer days, humid evenings and the slow tick-tick-tick of the metal peg on a bottom bouncer dragging along the substrate of a favorite walleye lake.  While normally I turn to trolling as a last resort for my fishing activities, the deployment of dozens of favorite spinners I’ve crafted behind a bottom bouncer is a nice compromise between dragging crankbaits and simply watching the rod tip wiggle and jigging for fish. It seems for this rapidly beginning summer after our particularly long winter I have a few extra dozens of them to work with, and that’s a good thing.
That’s because a bottom bouncer provides an idea of what’s going on below, and a reliable connection to the underwater world, while allowing for the added excitement of feeling the thump of a fish and telegraphing the first round of the fight. On that first take and the dip of the rod tip toward the fish – hopefully a walleye but sometimes a nice perch here and there as well – there’s always a sense of excitement that a school has been found and a return trip over the area will be worth it and add to the day’s catch in the livewell.
While it doesn’t always come with a transition in the lake bottom, more often than not when the steady drag of the lead-and-metal weight below turns into a skipping, ticking, bump in the gravel and rocks scattered below, a bite isn’t often far behind, and that’s when bottom bouncer trolling becomes fun.  Having that added facet of being able to feel and confirm what’s posted up on the sonar screen, be it that harder bottom or the occasional rock which likely provides a holding point for fish, is a great draw for this form of angling.  In turn, the added physical connection to the underwater world tacks on an element of control to the situation and completes the available sensory elements which help anglers make sense of their presentations and how, where and why fish react the way they do to them. 
In the end, trolling spinners or other rigs for walleyes is a proven method to catch fish, particularly as they become more aggressive and waters warm in the summer.  Additionally, it adds some action to the lazier angling effort of trolling, providing a hands-on element and the ability to feel and control a reaction to that first bite.  Whether it’s a simple slow-death rig with its spinning chunk of nightcrawler or the whirring of a large Colorado blade ahead of a whole one on a three-hook harness, bottom bouncers put favorite summertime walleye offerings in front of fish where they are feeding during the heart of the warm water season.  If you haven’t already, consider adding these to your repertoire this season, or try out a variety of different offerings, blade styles, bait options and the many different tweaks bottom bouncer fishing allows for.  Whether trolled relatively fast amidst a schooled frenzy of fish or worked slowly along a rocky reef for scattered walleyes, bottom bouncers can be quite versatile.
Put all the pieces of the puzzle together as spring becomes summer, walleyes transition to their mid-season openwater patterns, and you compile various spinners and setups to try out behind the metal clip on these specialized weights.  In time, you’ll likely find the arrangement, pattern, speeds, and special locations that make your summer fishing better behind the drag and tick of a well-deployed bottom bouncer…in our outdoors.

SW MN Hunt Logo