This year I decided I'd buy a few rods and try to get in on the Burwell bonanza that everyone is raving about.
Took off a couple of hours early from work and blasted down. Made a call to siphon some wisdom from a fellow 6-8 member and read up on how
@Way She Goes did things this morning.
I couldn't convince
@Stick to give up his plumbing career so I took my 6-year-old and 9-year-old to see whether I could teach them some new swears.
I don't do much right, so I opted to run dipseys from a rod tree. 4 dipseys (set on 1 and 3) and one lead core down the chute. I also opted to use my 44 year old boat and motor.
After an hour of frustration trying to figure out how much tension to put on the dipsey release screw, I solved the problem by dropping the screwdriver in the lake.
I heard Pink Panties was a good choice, so it was first out around 45 FOW. It was hit fairly quickly and is now swimming around lake erie in the jaw of some fish that didn't know that I was dumb enough to forget to close a snap.
I think I wound up with greasy chicken wing, piston cup, blueberry muffin, and mixed veg out on the dipseys, then some random blue and silver mutant out on the lead. The lead core was 6ish colours from who-knows-when that came on something that I bought at
@Stick's yard sale. I didn't want to trust it with more than a $2 spoon.
Well everything but the $2 spoon fired. All farm animals and silver bass. Took me a good while coaching the kids on bringing them in. We kept the silvers as a symbolic acceptance of our runner-up trip. Silver. Get it?
Then it happened.
A 2 minute break in the action that allowed me to check my navionics app and see that we were doing about 1.6 kts.
I bumped up the throttle on the 44 year old beast and sure enough we caught a walleye. While we reeled it in we circled uncontrollably and surely confused the nearby boats.
Okay. Relax. One is in the cooler. Let's try it again, but only in a straight line.
Nope.
More bites. More circling. More mayhem. Several fish lost due to trying desperately to release ("pop") a dipsy that is obviously too tight. A few lost at the boat when they got close enough to see a 6-year-old with an 11-foot-pole trying to make them into dinner.
Did I mention that I duct-taped my net to a pole to grab fish off the back of the boat? Yes, I'm that ghetto.
Eventually we approached a commercial net. Noticed it at the last minute, and cut the engine. Reeled everything up, and decided we had better head for shore.
We ended up with 5 eyes. We kept 4 silvers, released a bunch more and a fair few farm animals.
It was a bunch of fun. We didn't perform like the other reports from the last couple of days, but who cares!? Somehow we did better than
@Red Hering this week!!!
