"The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope." John Buchan

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Deer Creek, Wallsburg, with Alex and Jason. August 8th

So it's been a bit since the last trip.  Alex has been asking to go fishing again and Jason and I had a few false tries at getting a date picked and setup.  We managed to pull things together to get this trip up and running finally.  Weather gave us a few choices to pick from for destinations but after some recent reports about Deer Creek, where neither Jason nor I have done very well at before, we wanted to give things a try again influenced by the recent information we pulled from these posts.  Specifically the area we were to target is the Wallsburg Bay area marina (not the small launch at the end of the Bay, the one on the main body of the lake.  not sure what the full proper name is.) and then work up the rocky shore line into the Wallsburg Bay.




We got to the lake and were setup and on the water as the sun was coming up.  Water temps were just below 70 degrees F.  I'm not sure what air temps were but they were not too cold for swim trunks and a long sleeve shirt for keeping warm.






Fish were breaking the surface with a good amount of regularity so we started off working the top levels of the water as we moved away from the launch ramp.  We worked across the bay to the far side where the rocky shore looked very appealing for the prospect of some small mouth.  We hoped to pick up something along the way over but nothing appeared interested in the various offerings we presented.

Once we got to the far side I had a fish pick up a firetiger tail spinner I've made and I fought him to near the tube where I got a look at him, about 12" long, and he thrashed and was off the hook.  I passed word along to Jason and Alex and we all started to work the shoreline at various locations.  Jason reported a fish on and loss similar to mine.  I had another on that only got close enough for me to see the flash in the water but I'd guess another small mouth at 12" or less, probably less.

Where things had started to look up and like the bite was going to be on for us it kind of puttered out and we fell into just working the shore, being taunted by the jumping fish and we worked our way deeper into the bay.

Along the way I ended up with a woolly bugger behind a full bubble to drag along (troll?) as I kicked down the shore line.  I had a fish hit and quickly had myself a nice rainbow in the net.


A ways deeper into the bay both Jason's and my fish finders started going crazy showing fish suspended at nearly all levels from about 12' down to about 42' down.  These fish seemed to mostly move up and down in the water column as we watched the finders.  Much of the movement seemed "together".  I'm honestly not sure what to make of that.  Well we had no idea what the finders were reporting until Jason had a pole he was running a set of jigs at about 20' down in 32' of water.  To our surprise he landed a really healthy looking Crappie.  Hmm now we got wondering if these suspended fish were not Crappie.



Hoping to get into some good crappie action we started working a good number of presentations seeing what they might be interested in.  They wanted a whole lot of nothing that we offered.  Jason had a few light inquiries and I had a couple as well.  Nothing that ended up with a solid hook set.

I put one line down to run a few feet above the bottom and the other about mid depth and started to turn around to head back down the bay toward the launch.  The finder was being pretty quiet now but occasionally showed a fish mark on the bottom or somewhere mid depth.   My deeper line went bend and I set the hook and managed a really nice perch.


Looking around as we kicked around with the really nice weather today presented for us I snapped a few pictures of the scenery and of some of the distant clouds that were moving by.






Anyway we worked our way back toward the launch ramp and fished our way there.  We marked a good number of more fish and Alex had one take his line and give a good set of yanks but he was not paying attention and missed his chance to set the hook.  Somewhere along the way he announced he had lost his clippers and eye buster.  It ends up that he was thinking that taking off his clipper and eye buster from the tether and then holding it over the water to "risk" dropping it seemed fun up until the point that he did drop it....  Well it could have been worse so we talked about it and how not to do this again and moved on.




We made it back to the launch sometime near 1:30pm and started to load up to head home.



We failed to get a few picks of the fish until we got home.  Then trying to entertain ourselves after all the recent BFT drama over holding the fish so far out away from you as you take a picture to make it look bigger we felt we had to take a few of our own.  So we volunteered Alex to model the fish for us.





So while it was not a gang buster day out on the water and Alex came home with a foul smell... It was a great day for us on Deer Creek compared to a few previous attempts to fish there.  We will surely visit it again.  Though one point in hindsight... We ended up covering a lot more water then we "usually" do kicking the tubes.  Playing with google maps I estimate we covered somewhere near 4-4.5 miles of water round trip.  So the conclusion is, if you are going to do that, you need to plan into your day for an afternoon nap... ;)

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