A Warm November and Afternoon Rainbows

This past Saturday, I took advantage of the warm weather that is sweeping across the Twin Cities area. I headed to one of my favorite local lakes to do some fly fishing. Most of the time it has just been for practice aiming for panfish like bluegill and pumpkinseed. But with the cooler temps that we have seen the last couple weeks many of the panfish have receded to greater depths and I can't reach them anymore. But, feeling quite optimistic, I visited the lake anyway hoping that I could catch one of the trout that rumor has it, inhabit the lake I was visiting. As I proceeded to make my way around the lake I found a large amount of wildlife also out, enjoying the warm weather. There were numerous geese and muskrats paddling around on the water surface. I had ventured to a part of the lake that was sheltered from the breeze and therefore quite calm. The surface was very undisturbed and I threw out my popper hoping for some action from a bluegill. I was greeted with a little sunny almost immediately and as I worked to get it from the hook a large splash caught my attention. Something had made a decent ripple farther out from shore. As I continued to watch several more ripples began to appear. I hastily searched for a different fly in my box not sure what to pick because I didn't really see any bugs to speak of. In the process of switching flies I saw several fish jump out of the water, including a trout that jumped three times from the water within a span of just seconds. It was truly magnificent. Finally I settled on a fly that I had made my self which you can see below. To my absolute amazement, it worked, and I caught two very nice Rainbow Trout. They were roughly 16" and quite fat. They fought hard and it was truly exhilarating to catch a fish on something that I had made. I'll leave you with my best picture.

Enjoy.

Fish Lake Adventures

So here are some pictures of my adventure at Fish Lake today. I've been out the past couple days there, but I haven't had my camera. Today I finally brought it. Fly fishing has been good, but the wind was a bit of an inconvenience sometimes. I also met this cool kid name Carl who is a really good fisherman for how young he is. He caught quite a few bass, bull heads, and panfish.
Hopefully all this fly fishing I've been doing is helping to improve my skills.I also paid a visit to Holland lake to see what that looks like and I'm very excited to do some fishing there this week. They have a very nice dock to cast off of and a great park in general. Finally, I got a picture up of a brown trout I tried to draw last night along with some new zonker flies I tied. Let me know what you think.

Enjoy.

Fishing on the St. Croix River

This past weekend, my girlfriend and I had the pleasure of heading up to Wisconsin to visit Taylor’s Falls and St. Croix. We got to stop and see fish at the hatchery and also do a little fishing on the river itself. It was a real treat to fish on such a big, open river and the scenery was amazing. There was a lot of wildlife present. It even appeared that there was a juvenile eagle flying around that looked like it was trying to catch fish from the river.

Some real excitement came when we started fishing. I was casting from shallow water out into some riffles using just a small spinner. I was weary of using anything with large hooks because of all the wood and rocks along the riffle. However, when I had gotten my second cast reeled to within 10 feet of myself, I felt a huge tug and at first I thought I snagged something. But what ever it was started thrashing and I saw a flash of white and quite a large tail and then it got off. I never got it close enough to identify but what ever it was must have been at least 24 inches.

Shortly after, my girlfriend started fishing but we didn’t have much luck after that. We got one other fish that wasn’t nearly as big that looked like some sort of silver, bassy-panfish. There were also several fish jumping throughout the river. It was a lot of fun and hopefully we can get out again to try for some more fish.







Enjoy 

Fish Lake, Eagan, Mn

Welcome to Eagan, MN. We have moved into our new place here in town and it is pretty awesome so far. After Em and I got a general idea of directions down, we did some searching on the web and located a nice lake to try out. The lake was called Fish Lake, which according to the park information, was home to pike, walleye, bass, panfish, and bull heads. We had fun catching some bluegill and one of them Em caught was even brilliant blue. There was also a fella there who said he has some great luck with bass the night before a storm. Can't wait to get out again. Tonight is full of large hail producing thunderstorms, so we'll be hanging out inside tonight!

The city of Eagan put together a nice guide to the fishable lakes in the area which you can access here: Eagan Fishing

Enjoy!