Gale Force Winds

I was scheduled to fish St-Louis today with Mike, Dave, Rick & Dan, but due to the hurricane like winds, we were forced to reconsider and hit St-Francis. With the bass season still not open until tomorrow, we had to fish for pike, on the Ontario side of the lake. We did manage to get to a few areas in Quebec and caught both largemouth & smallouth up to 4.5 pounds. There were plenty of pike caught in Ontario with the largest going almost 10 pounds. Winds were the biggest problem today blowing out of the NW at 20 to 30 knots with even stronger gusts at times. This made boat control really difficult with five people on board and there were a few ugly tangles at times. We had a rainy start to the day with maximum air temps reaching almost 70 degrees, but the wind was the biggest restricting problem we had to overcome. I don’t think we found water temps that were any higher than 66 degrees in the shallowest water and most of the areas we fished were closer to 65 degrees at best. The fish were in a spawn & post spawn mode in most places, but I did actually find a few fish still looking like pre spawn. Today, we caught both pike & bass on a variety of baits like tubes, crankbaits, spinnerbaits, senko’s and soft plastic jerkbaits. You might say they were hitting anything we threw at them! By days end we had landed probably 30 or 40 bass and over a dozen northerns. There were probably at least that many either lost or just missed as well due to the strong winds. All in all a great day despite what “Mother Nature” had dished out!!