Wisconsin Fall Trip

[Jeff Tief]

Spent a couple of days this week in Wisconsin on a hunt for big fish.Didn't time it well as fishing buddy Danny had a couple of Drs. appointments and I had some Grandpa duties at Arcadia Valley's Fall Festival.Traveled to Racine,Wi on Tuesday and looked the river and steelhead facility over and tried to generate some kind of plan.Lower water and not much fish movement but the reports we had on the other two rivers we fished weren't promising.Fished Wednesday for 8 hours and had 7 legal hookups and landed 5 kings and 1 brown.Danny had 3 legal kings in 5 1/2hoursof fishing.Had fished this water on and off since 1997 so we weren't too impressed with the first day.The kings were in the 15-20# range and the brown I released was around 8#.They were planning to process fish the next day so we decided to take a break and watch that show.Had about 10 DNR folks sorting ,spawning and releasing kings, coho's, brown's and the occasional steelhead.Only say them spawning the coho .For some reason they don't post the fishing reports very often so a big rain can make the difference in a big surge of fish out of Lake Michigan or few fish in the stream.We ended up fishing 5 hours Thursday with mixed results.I had 3 legit strikes and lost a nice king and male coho.I did land a coho in the 10-11# range.Danny only had 2 strikes and lost a nice coho but landed his personal best 11 1/2# brown trout.Guess it wasn't too bad a trip as some other long time fishing friends spent a week in Michigan 2 weeks ago and didn't land any fish.

[rangerman]

Jeff,

Keep an eye on the lake link website. They have really good up to date reports. Doesn't sound like a bad trip to me though!

[Jeff Tief]

Rangerman, I usually check any info out in advance of our trip to get the best results.Have gotten some good info from the lake-link website in the past.Seems like the numbers were down in Wisconsin and Michigan this year.Have kept records back to 1999 and and they had processed as many as 10,000 king salmon at this time of year in 2000.Don't think they have hit 3,000 kings yet this year but the latest report from the DNR said lots of fish in the lake waiting for the next rain /snow event to get water levels up.You are correct in stating it wasn't a bad trip-doesn't take a whole lot of battles with those kings to make it a good day.