Pool 4 6-19-10

[sandmannd]

Rui and I made plans this week to hit the St. Croix and pool 3 as I usually do on the weekend. We had every intention of doing so up until last night. I called my buddy River Dan and he had been down in Wabasha since Tuesday night. He said he had been knocking the socks off the walleye hand-lining for the past four days. I called Rui and told him of the change of plan. I was at Fleet Farm when I made the call and he told me that the bright yellow Raps were really getting hit. I searched and couldn't find any. Called around to some local places and they didn't have them either.

So this morning I got up at a little after 3, made some breakfast for us and got the boat loaded up. Rui showed up at four and we were on our way. After stopping for some gas we got down to Wabasha at about six and were on the water. We made our way from the launch up to the south end of Lake Pepin to find River Dan hand-lining already. We watched Dan pick up quite a few on his yellow raps but weren't having as much luck with ours. I started with a #5 blue and #7 orange on my rig and got one small one after about an hour. Then I lost my blue rap so changed out to fire tiger. Dan was still catching and actually chucked two keepers over to us in the boat.

It took Rui and I until about nine and we started getting more into them. Part of the problem was my trolling motor couldn't keep up going against the 3 foot waves and my main motor needs the impeller changed so could only run it so long before the alarm went off. Makes it hard to stay on a pattern. When we were going with the waves we didn't have any problem. The key was to get into the spot where it was a big drop from 24' to 30' of water. When you go over that, there was a fish. Picked up a couple in 42' feet as well.

Rui didn't have as much luck with the hand-lining. He tried lindy rigging but that was a no go with the current and waves. So he tried a jig, again, hard to make contact. Then he pulled out this gigantic, green 1 oz jig and put a fathead on it. I laughed a little until it hit bottom and he had a hit. Brought it up and just the head of the minnow left. Put another minnow on and same thing. Third time he got a nice keeper in the boat.

We only had time to fish till 10:30 but we came home with 8 keepers and 1 nice pike (River Dan doesn't allow "Slimers" in his boat). It was my first time down there and it was a lot of fun to learn a new part of the river. I'll have to make a few more trips down that way and play around in Pepin a little next time.