Page 54 - ODUNovAndDec2018

It happened again this summer. Mike Frisch and I have both chased and caught a lot of fish over the

years. We know that if the fish aren’t eating what we’re offering them,
we need to offer them something different or try another spot. One warm
day in July we were on a lake that we had never fished before.
We enjoy exploring new waters. We had some new baits that
we wanted to experiment with. They were designed for
shallow water slop fishing. They worked really well,
but most of the bass that ate them were of
the small variety. We were having a good

time, but we decided that we would
have a better time if the fish
were bigger. We tied on
some jigheads and
attached
Strike King

Ocho
Worms
to

them and went to a nearby weedline. There we caught lots of fish, and they were much larger.
Reminder: It doesn’t matter how we want to catch the fish, if we want to be successful, we need to
offer them what they want and where they want it. That is a helpful reminder for the upcoming ice-

fishing season.

Over the past several decades my boat partners and I have used in-line planer boards to catch salmon,
trout, walleyes big-time, even northern pike and crappies. This year Tanner Arndt and I used in-line
boards to catch dozens of perch in a short period of time on Big Stone Lake on the Minnesota-South
Dakota border. We had four boards out with Lucky Shad crankbaits behind them. This spread of lines
enabled us to efficiently show the perch a variety

of lure colors. On this day, color didn’t matter, but
some days it does. There were times that we had
four perch on at once: Lots of fun! Off Shore
Tackle makes the easiest-to-use, best running
boards that I and many others have ever used.

Fishing for the most part across the Midwest is
outstanding, and in many places, it continues to

improve. The better-than-it-used-to-be fishing is
for several reasons. Certainly, our equipment is
much better. Modern sonar draws such a good
picture of the underwater world, and from several
different perspectives.

Rods are much more sensitive and affordable, lines