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Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
No plan, no problem on Mississippi River
Fishing column: A ‘no expectation’ day yielded many fish
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WABASHA, Minn. — There aren't many times when my buddy Randy Randall and I head out on the Mississippi River with no expectations.
Usually, there's some kind of bite to pursue. This time of year, it might be walleyes on the wingdams, bass on the weed edges, crappies on backwater wood or big bluegills in the slack water on the main channel.
That wasn't the case a couple of weeks ago.
Just when it was returning to near-normal levels on Pool 4, the river spiked again and was two feet above normal. Water clarity was terrible, and the current was ripping. We had no specific areas in mind, no single species to target and no particular presentation to try.
We had a couple dozen nightcrawlers and an assortment of jigs, crankbaits and blade baits.
Sometimes, you just need to go fishing.
We started our day near a complex of submerged grass and weeds along a large eddy close to where we launched the boat.
Randy tossed a Rapala DT8 toward the weed edge. Bang! A scrappy largemouth bass erupted from the cover, smashed his lure and launched itself out of the water. Eventually, I slipped the net under the 3 1/2-pound bigmouth. Randy kept flipping that crankbait while I tried walking a topwater along the vegetation.
He caught five more dandy bass. I caught nothing.
When that bite died down, we idled up the channel to fish a couple of wingdams where the current was manageable. The only takers we found were a few of the freshwater drum that seem to be everywhere in Pool 4 and are fond of hair jigs.
Next, we set up along a breakline where Lake Pepin necks down into the river channel. It's a popular spot that produces a fair number of walleye and sauger, although there hadn't been much of a bite there the previous couple of weeks. Randy put on a gold Berkley Vibrato blade bait, and I tried a jig tipped with half a crawler.
We didn't make it far when Randy set the hook into a solid fish. Another sheephead? A catfish? A roaming smallmouth bass? Maybe a northern pike? This fish stayed deep and shook its head from side to side.
"This might be a walleye," Randy said as he worked the fish closer to the boat.
"Whoa! That's a good one," I added when we got our first look at the fish. Randy steered it toward the net and we put the 24-incher in the boat for a quick photo and release.
That Vibrato kept producing. Randy boated sheephead after sheephead with a couple of small walleyes in between. My jig and crawler produced a few small sheepies and one ambitious bluegill.
After a couple hours of that, we headed into the lake to check a couple of rockpiles. More sheephead and a couple of baby walleyes. Then I set the hook into something huge.
"Uh-oh," I said, suspecting it was a big flathead catfish or possibly a snagged lake sturgeon. "I don't think this is what we're looking for. I'm just going to break it off."
"We have to get a look at it," Randy countered.
So the battle was on. It took awhile, but my 6-pound Berkley Fireline held up and I outlasted a smallmouth buffalo that ate the hair jig I was bouncing. We estimated it at around 30 pounds.
From there, it was back to the drift at the far south end of the lake where Randy caught his big walleye. This time, he found a 3 1/2-pound smallmouth bass in between his sheephead.
Not far from the breakline we were drifting a large group seagulls had gathered. That usually means shad in the area, so we motored that way to see what was going on.
There's a defined ridge of sorts that tops out at about 7-8 feet adjacent to deep water close to the opportunistic birds. As we scanned the ridge with the electronics in my boat, the graph lit up with a massive school of shad in the bottom half of the water column. Larger fish could be seen within and around the mass of baitfish.
"Must be white bass," I observed. "Let's find out."
We anchored a long cast away from the shad. I put on a No. 3 French spinner, threw it as far as I could, let it sink for a few seconds, then began the retrieve. An ornery white bass slammed the spinner. I caught five or six before Randy switched, and over the next hour we boated at least 50 big "stripers." Some were truly giants in the 2-pound-plus class.
"Let's catch one more apiece and call it a day," I said.
That happened immediately as we doubled up for the umpteenth time.
"How about we go until we don't catch one?" Randy countered.
My streak reached two before I was done. I could only laugh as Randy put six in a row in the boat.
"That was a lot of fun," Randy noted as we motored back to the boat landing.
A day that began with no plan and no expectations turned out to be a day filled with quality fish. That's the Mississippi River.
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