Fishing has been pretty darn good this spring in the Brainerd lakes area! I have mainly good trips, but this morning I had my mom and dad out and we were not able to muster any walleye. Why? Because we didn't have the right bait.
Should I have treated my parents just like any other customer and been prepared for everything? Of course, but instead Nick's boat (Nick, Gloria and Wayne) put the hammer down on the walleye. All we caught were three pike. We were using minnows, and fishing the same way we have been catching them all spring, but today they wanted a leech.
It's hard to see someone else just nailing the fish when we're not! Has it happened before? Yep. And will it happen again? Maybe.
So, it turns out that my first really slow trip of the season happened with my parents in the boat ... that's just the way it goes. As a walleye fisherman, especially these days, you better be rigged and ready with many presentations and better make sure you have the trio (leeches, crawlers and minnows) of live bait along on each trip because you just never know what they are looking for on that given day. The most versatile fisherman are the ones who are going to be the most successful. As a walleye fisherman, the brain is always going in many directions and it sure does feel good when you figure out where they are and what they want! But it really sucks when you are seeing fish caught and you don't have the right presentation. It did happen to us this morning, but you can bet that I will learn from this trip.
I am ecstatic that Nick and his customers hammered them, and it is certainly better that the paying customers were the ones who had all of the success. Nick did offer us leeches, but by the time we moved into that vicinity I was pretty much sizzled and ready to get on with the rest of the day.
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It's nice to have a number of other fisherman to bounce different things off of because it makes us all better fishermen. And the bottom line, we have all been on both ends of the whooping stick! That's what makes this sport such an intriguing and humbling sport. It's also nice to have a variety of age on our guide staff, the young bucks bring a new and open mind to the scene and our wily veteran Bruce brings a whole lot of everything else!
Book em Shello!, Walleyedan
